Tag: occupy

Trickster Makes This Web: The Ambiguous Politics of Anonymous

a review of Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014)
by Gavin Mueller
~

Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (HHWS) tackles a difficult and pressing subject: the amorphous hacker organization Anonymous. The book is not a strictly academic work. Rather, it unfolds as a rather lively history of a subculture of geeks, peppered with snippets of cultural theory and autobiographical portions. As someone interested in a more sustained theoretical exposition of Anonymous’s organizing and politics, I was a bit disappointed, though Coleman has opted for a more readable style. In fact, this is the book’s best asset. However, while containing a number of insights of interest to the general reader, the book ultimately falters as an assessment of Anonymous’s political orientation, or the state of hacker politics in general.

Coleman begins with a discussion of online trolling, a common antagonistic online cultural practice; many Anons cut their troll teeth at the notorious 4chan message board. Trolling aims to create “lulz,” a kind of digital schadenfreude produced by pranks, insults and misrepresentations. According to Coleman, the lulz are “a form of cultural differentiation and a tool or weapon used to attack, humiliate, and defame” rooted in the use of “inside jokes” of those steeped in the codes of Internet culture (32). Coleman argues that the lulz has a deeper significance: they “puncture the consensus around our politics and ethics, our social lives and our aesthetic sensibilities.” But trolling can be better understood through an offline frame of reference: hazing. Trolling is a means by which geeks have historically policed the boundaries of the subcultural corners of the Internet. If you can survive the epithets and obscene pictures, you might be able to hang. That trolling often takes the form of misogynist, racist and homophobic language is unsurprising: early Net culture was predominantly white and male, a demographic fact which overdetermines the shape of resentment towards “newbies” (or in 4chan’s unapologetically offensive argot, “newfags”). The lulz is joy that builds community, but almost always at someone else’s expense.

Coleman, drawing upon her background as an anthropologist, conceptualizes the troll as an instantiation of the trickster archetype which recurs throughout mythology and folklore. Tricksters, she argues, like trolls and Anonymous, are liminal figures who defy norms and revel in causing chaos. This kind of application of theory is a common technique in cultural studies, where seemingly apolitical or even anti-social transgressions, like punk rock or skateboarding, can be politicized with a dash of Bakhtin or de Certeau. Here it creates difficulties. There is one major difference between the spider spirit Anansi and Coleman’s main informant on trolling, the white supremacist hacker weev: Anansi is fictional, while weev is a real person who writes op-eds for neo-Nazi websites. The trickster archetype, a concept crafted for comparative structural analysis of mythology, does little to explain the actually existing social practice of trolling. Instead it renders it more complicated, ambiguous, and uncertain. These difficulties are compounded as the analysis moves to Anonymous. Anonymous doesn’t merely enact a submerged politics via style or symbols. It engages in explicitly political projects, complete with manifestos, though Coleman continues to return to transgression as one of its salient features.

The trolls of 4chan, from which Anonymous emerged, developed a culture of compulsory anonymity. In part, this was technological: unlike other message boards and social media, posting on 4chan requires no lasting profile, no consistent presence. But there was also a cultural element to this. Identifying oneself is strongly discouraged in the community. Fittingly, its major trolling weapon is doxing: revealing personal information to facilitate further harassment offline (prank calls, death threats, embarrassment in front of employers). As Whitney Phillips argues, online trolling often acts as a kind of media critique: by enforcing anonymity and rejecting fame or notoriety, Anons oppose the now-dominant dynamics of social media and personal branding which have colonized much of the web, and threaten their cherished subcultural practices, which are more adequately enshrined in formats such as image boards and IRC. In this way, Anonymous deploys technological means to thwart the dominant social practices of technology, a kind of wired Luddism. Such practices proliferate in the communities of the computer underground, which is steeped in an omnipresent prelapsarian nostalgia since at least the “eternal September” of the early 1990s.

HHWS’s overarching narrative is the emergence of Anonymous out of the cesspits of 4chan and into political consciousness: trolling for justice instead of lulz. The compulsory anonymity of 4chan, in part, determined Anonymous’s organizational form: Anonymous lacks formal membership, instead formed from entirely ad hoc affiliations. The brand itself can be selectively deployed or disavowed, leading to much argumentation and confusion. Coleman provides an insider perspective on how actions are launched: there is debate, occasionally a rough consensus, and then activity, though several times individuals opt to begin an action, dragging along a number of other participants of varying degrees of reluctance. Tactics are formalized in an experimental, impromptu way. In this, I recognized the way actions formed in the Occupy encampments. Anonymous, as Coleman shows, was an early Occupy Wall Street booster, and her analysis highlights the connection between the Occupy form and the networked forms of sociality exemplified by Anonymous. After reading Coleman’s account, I am much more convinced of Anonymous’s importance to the movement. Likewise, many criticisms of Occupy could also be levelled at Anonymous; Coleman cites Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” as one candidate.

If Anonymous can be said to have a coherent political vision, it is one rooted in civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech and opposition censorship efforts. Indeed, Coleman earns the trust of several hackers by her affiliation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, nominally the digital equivalent to the ACLU (though some object to this parallel, due in part to EFF’s strong ties to industry). Geek politics, from Anonymous to Wikileaks to the Pirate Bay, are a weaponized form of the mantra “information wants to be free.” Anonymous’s causes seem fit these concerns perfectly: Scientology’s litigious means of protecting its secrets provoked its wrath, as did the voluntary withdrawal of services to Wikileaks by PayPal and Mastercard, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit police’s blacking out of cell phone signals to scuttle a protest.

I’ve referred to Anonymous as geeks rather than hackers deliberately. Hackers — skilled individuals who can break into protected systems — participate in Anonymous, but many of the Anons pulled from 4chan are merely pranksters with above-average knowledge of the Internet and computing. This gets the organization in quite a bit of trouble when it engages in the political tactic of most interest to Coleman, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS floods a website with requests, overwhelming its servers. This technique has captured the imaginations of a number of scholars, including Coleman, with its resemblance to offline direct action like pickets and occupations. However, the AnonOps organizers falsely claimed that their DDoS app, the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon, ensured user anonymity, leading to a number of Anons facing serious criminal charges. Coleman curiously places the blame for this startling breach of operational security on journalists writing about AnonOps, rather on the organizers themselves. Furthermore, many DDoS attacks, including those launched by Anonymous, have relied on botnets, which draw power from hundreds of hijacked computers, bears little resemblance to any kind of democratic initiative. Of course, this isn’t to say that the harsh punishments meted out to Anons under the auspices of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are warranted, but that political tactics must be subjected to scrutiny.

Coleman argues that Anonymous outgrew its narrow civil libertarian agenda with its involvement in the Arab Spring: “No longer was the group bound to Internet-y issues like censorship and file-sharing” (148). However, by her own account, it is opposition to censorship which truly animates the group. The #OpTunisia manifesto (Anonymous names its actions with the prefix “Op,” for operations, along with the ubiquitous Twitter-based hashtag) states plainly, “Any organization involved in censorship will be targeted” (ibid). Anons were especially animated by the complete shut-off of the Internet in Tunisia and Egypt, actions which shattered the notion of the Internet as a space controlled by geeks, not governments. Anonymous operations launched against corporations did not oppose capitalist exploitation but fought corporate restrictions on online conduct. These are laudable goals, but also limited ones, and are often compatible with Silicon Valley companies, as illustrated by the Google-friendly anti-SOPA/PIPA protests.

Coleman is eager to distance Anonymous from the libertarian philosophies rife in geek and hacker circles, but its politics are rarely incompatible with such a perspective. The most recent Guy Fawkes Day protest I witnessed in Washington, D.C., full of mask-wearing Anons, displayed a number of slogans emerging from the Ron Paul camp, “End the Fed” prominent among them. There is no accounting for this in HHWS. It is clear that political differences among Anons exists, and that any analysis must be nuanced. But Coleman’s description of this nuance ultimately doesn’t delineate the political positions within the group and how they coalesce, opting to elide these differences in favor of a more protean focus on “transgression.” In this way, she is able to provide a conceptual coherence for Anonymous, albeit at the expense of a detailed examination of the actual politics of its members. In the final analysis, “Anonymous became a generalized symbol for dissent, a medium to channel deep disenchantment… basically, with anything” (399).

As political concerns overtake the lulz, Anonymous wavers as smaller militant hacker crews LulzSec and AntiSec take the fore, doxing white hat security executives, leaking documents, and defacing websites. This frustrates Coleman: “Anonymous had been exciting to me for a specific reason: it was the largest and most populist disruptive grassroots movement the Internet had, up to that time, fomented. But it felt, suddenly like AnonOps/Anonymous was slipping into a more familiar state of hacker-vanguardism” (302). Yet it is at this moment that Coleman offers a revealing account of hacker ideology: its alignment with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. From 4chan’s trolls scoffing at morality and decency, to hackers disregarding technical and legal restraints to accessing information, to the collective’s general rejection any standard form of accountability, Anonymous truly seems to posit itself as beyond good and evil. Coleman herself confesses to being “overtly romantic” as she supplies alibis for the group’s moral and strategic failures (it is, after all, incredibly difficult for an ethnographer to criticize her informants). But Nietzsche was a profoundly undemocratic thinker, whose avowed elitism should cast more of a disturbing shadow over the progressive potentials behind hacker groups than it does for Coleman, who embraces the ability of hackers to “cast off — at least momentarily — the shackles of normativity and attain greatness” (275). Coleman’s previous work on free software programmers convincingly makes the case for a Nietzschean current running through hacker culture; I am considerably more skeptical than she is about the liberal democratic viewpoint this engenders.

Ultimately, Coleman concludes that Anonymous cannot work as a substitute for existing organizations, but that its tactics should be taken up by other political formations: “The urgent question is how to promote cross-pollination” between Anonymous and more formalized structures (374). This may be warranted, but there needs to be a fuller accounting of the drawbacks to Anonymous. Because anyone can fly its flag, and because its actions are guided by talented and charismatic individuals working in secret, Anonymous is ripe for infiltration. Historically, hackers have proven to be easy for law enforcement and corporations to co-opt, not the least because of the ferocious rivalries amongst hackers themselves. Tactics are also ambiguous. A DDoS can be used by anti-corporate activists, or by corporations against their rivals and enemies. Document dumps can ruin a diplomatic initiative, or a woman’s social life. Public square occupations can be used to advocate for democracy, or as a platform for anti-democratic coups. Currently, a lot of the same geek energy behind Anonymous has been devoted to the misogynist vendetta GamerGate (in a Reddit AMA, Coleman adopted a diplomatic tone, referring to GamerGate as “a damn Gordian knot”). Without a steady sense of Anonymous’s actual political commitments, outside of free speech, it is difficult to do much more than marvel at the novelty of their media presence (which wears thinner with each overwrought communique). With Hoaxer, Hacker, Whistleblower, Spy, Coleman has offered a readable account of recent hacker history, but I remain unconvinced of Anonymous’s political potential.

_____

Gavin Mueller (@gavinsaywhat) is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at George Mason University, and an editor at Jacobin and Viewpoint Magazine.

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February 11, 2015
The Mouse That Roared: The Democratic Movement in Hong Kong

an essay by Arif Dirlik
~
In 1997, the British government handed Hong Kong over to the People’s Republic of China(PRC) after 150 years of colonial rule. Some observers at the time could not but wonder if Hong Kong would be absorbed and remade by the behemoth to the north, or transform with its proverbial dynamism “the motherland” that already was undergoing radical change. The popular uprising under way in Hong Kong is the most recent indication that the question was not an idle one. The answer is yet to come.

Hong Kong investments and technology played an important part in the 1980s in laying the ground for the PRC’s economic take-off. The “special economic zones” that were set up in Guangdong province at the beginning of “reform and opening” as gateways to global capitalism (while keeping the rest of the country immune to its effects) were intended to take advantage of the dynamic capitalism of neighboring Hong Kong. And they did. To this day, Guangdong leads the rest of the country in industrial production and wealth. It also heavily resembles Hong Kong with which it shares a common language and, despite three decades of separation after 1949, common cultural characteristics. Hong Kong has continued to play a crucial part in the country’s development.

It has been a different matter politically. Since the take-over in 1997 the leadership in Beijing has left no doubt of its enthusiasm for the oligarchic political structure that was already in place before the end of colonial rule. The many freedoms and rule of law Hong Kong people enjoyed were less appealing to a regime that preferred a population obedient to its strictures and a legal system more pliable at the service of Communist Party power. Already in the 1980s, Hong Kong people’s doubts about unification with the “motherland” were obvious in the exodus of those who could afford to leave to places like the United States, Canada and Australia. The exodus speeded up following the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989 which put to rest any hopes that reforms might open up a greater space for political freedoms. The colony practically disqualified itself as any kind of political inspiration for the Mainland with the enthusiastic participation of Hong Kongers in the Tiananmen movement leading up to the June Fourth massacre, and annual commemorations thereafter of the suppression of the student movement. In the early 1990s the Party under Deng Xiaoping settled on the example of Singapore as a model more attuned to its own authoritarian practices.

The same reasons that made the regime suspicious of Hong Kong people for their “lack of patriotism” due to the legacies of colonialism have made Hong Kong into an inspiration as well as a base for radical critics of the regime struggling for greater freedom and democracy on the Mainland. The take-over of 1997 was under the shadow of Tinanmen, but even so few would have imagined at the time that within two decades of the celebrations of the end of colonialism and “return” to the motherland, protestors against Beijing “despotism” would be waving British flags. Once the initial enthusiasm for “liberation” was over, Hong Kongers rediscovered as the source of their “difference” the colonial history which in nationalist historiography appeared as a lapse in the nation’s historical, a period of humiliation remembered most importantly to foster nationalist sentiment. PRC democracy activists such as the jailed Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have drawn the ire of the regime for suggesting that Hong Kong’s freedoms and democratic sentiments were legacies of colonial acculturation that Mainlanders had missed out on.

Current protests have their origins in a consciousness born of the anxieties provoked by the prospect of unification in the 1980s and 1990s, and even though both the Mainland and Hong Kong have changed radically in the intervening period, the Hong Kong identity that assumed recognizable contours at the time is a fundamental driving force of the protests. The immediate issue that has provoked the protests—call for universal suffrage in the selection of the chief executive and legislative council of the Special Administrative Region—harks back to the Basic Law of 1984 agreed upon by the British and the PRC as a condition of unification. The Basic Law stipulated that Hong Kong would be subject internally to its own laws for fifty years after the take-over under a system of “one country, two systems,” with its own chief executive and a legislature elected by an election committee representing various functional constituencies in a corporatist arrangement. The arrangement openly favored the corporate and financial ruling class in Hong Kong which in turn was prepared to align its interests with those of the Communist regime in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) was something of a political counterpart to the “special economic zones”—an exception that was granted not to compromise national sovereignty but as an act of sovereign power. In all matters pertaining to governance and the law, the SAR would be accountable to the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing. Hong Kong was granted representation in the NPC which, like all representation in that body, has served more to consolidate central control than to allow for the democratic airing of public opinion and grievances.

“One country, two systems” was an unstable structure. It was important to the PRC for patriotic reasons to put an end to the colonialism at its doorstep and retrieve territory lost a century and a half ago. But some compromise with the departing British was unavoidable given the strategic importance to the new project of development of the global corporate and financial hub that was Hong Kong. The autonomy granted to Hong Kong was subject to the good faith of the Beijing government. What might happen if the PRC no longer needed this hub seemed like a remote contingency in the 1980s, but already by the 1990s there was talk of the rise of Shanghai as a competitor. It is not out of the question that the present unrest which may undermine faith in Hong Kong as a corporate and financial center is not entirely undesirable to the regime now that preparations have been completed to launch a new financial center in Shanghai.

A similar uncertainty attended the issue of governance under the system. The Basic Law held out the possibility of democratic government and universal suffrage in Hong Kong subject to circumstances to be determined by the NPC. It nourished hopes in democracy, but reserved for Beijing final say on when and how democracy was to be exercised. There were no guarantees that full democracy would be granted if Hong Kongers invited the displeasure of the government in Beijing—or circumstances within the country made it undesirable. This is the immediate issue in the current protests (along with public dissatisfaction with the current chief executive, Leung Chun Ying who, like his two predecessors since 1997, is widely viewed as a Beijing puppet). To Hong Kong democracy advocates, the offer of universal suffrage is a mockery of the promise of full democracy when the choices are limited to candidates carefully selected by an electoral commission packed with Beijing loyalists.

The take-over in 1997, and the circumstances of its negotiation, had one very significant consequence that in likelihood was unanticipated: the politicization of Hong Kong society. Hong Kong long had a reputation as a cultural and political “desert.” The British colonial regime was successful in diverting popular energies to the struggle for everyday existence, and for those who could, the pursuit of wealth. At the height of the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland in 1967, labor disputes erupted into riots against the colonial government led by pro-Beijing leftists. But sustained political activity dates back to the negotiations surrounding the take-over, especially the mobilization instigated by the Tiananmen movement in Beijing. Politics over the last twenty-five years has revolved around the assertion of a Hong Kong identity against dissolution into the PRC. As a new political consciousness has found expression in the efflorescence of a Hong Kong culture in film and literature, the latter has played no little part in stimulating political activity. Ironically, while the goal of “one country, two systems” was to ease Hong Kong into the PRC, the very recognition of the differences of Hong Kong from the rest of the country would seem to have underlined the existence of a Hong Kong identity that differentiated the former colony from the rest of PRC society.

Current protests have focused attention on issues of governance. Far more important are the social tensions and the economic transformations that lend urgency to protestors’ demand for political recognition and rights. One important indication is the part young people—teenagers—have played in the protests. Joshua Wong, who has emerged as a leader, is seventeen years old, which means that he was born in 1997, the year of the take-over.

The generation Wong represents has come of age in a society subject to deepening social and economic problems. The wealth gap in Hong Kong is nothing new, but as elsewhere in the world, inequality has assumed critical proportions with increased concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite allied with Beijing. Since 1997, the experience of marginalization has been intensified with the inundation of the city by Mainlanders with their newfound wealth which has increased prices of commodities, put pressures on public services––including housing, health and education––and introduced new cultural fissures. Some Hong Kong businesses prefer Mainland customers on whose business they have come to be dependent. In the 1990s, Mainlanders living in Hong Kong used to complain about the prejudice they suffered from Hong Kongers with their pretensions to superior cultural sophistication. That has been reversed. Even the most uncouth Mainlanders are likely to look down on Hong Kongers for not being authentically Chinese, which typifies PRC attitudes toward Chinese populations elsewhere. While Hong Kongers complain about “locusts” from the North, a very-unConfucian Beijing University professor descended from Confucius refers to Hong Kongers as “bastards” contaminated by their colonial past. The central government in Beijing, sharing the suspicious of southerners of its imperial predecessors, is engaged in efforts to discourage the use of Cantonese while instilling in the local population its version of what it means to be “Chinese.” We may recall that the present protests were preceded two years ago by successful protests against Beijing-backed efforts to introduce “patriotic” education to Hong Kong schools. It is not that Hong Kong people are not patriotic. They are very patriotic indeed. But their patriotism is mediated by their Hong Kong identity, a very product of the take-over that Beijing would like to erase.

The upheaval in Hong bears similarities to “Occupy” movements elsewhere in the economic issues that inform it. It also has its roots in the special circumstances of Hong Kong society, and its relationship to Beijing. The movement may be viewed as the latest chapter in a narrative that goes back to the 1980s, the emergence of a neoliberal global capitalism of which the PRC has been an integral component, and the Tiananmen movement which was one of the earliest expressions of the social and political strains created by shifts in the global economy. The demands for democracy in the protests are clearly not merely “political.” Democracy is important to the protestors not only as a means to retrieving some control over their lives, but also to overcome inequality. The authorities in Beijing are quite aware of this link. A Law professor from Tsinghua University in Beijing who also serves as an advisor on Hong Kong affairs just recently announced that democracy would jeopardize the wealthy who are crucial to the welfare of Hong Kong’s capitalist economy. It may seem ironic that a Communist Party should be devoted to the protection of wealthy capitalists, but that is the reality of contemporary PRC society that the protestors are struggling against.

The protests are also the latest chapter in the formation of a Hong Kong identity which assumed urgency with the prospect of return to the “motherland” in the 1980s. This, too, is a threat to a regime in flux that finds itself threatened by identity claims among the populations it rules over. It seems superfluous to say that allowing the people of Hong Kong the self-rule they demand would have adverse consequences in encouraging separatism among the various ethnic groups already in rebellion against the regime, and further stimulate democracy activists among the Han population. Hitherto pro-Beijing Guomindang leader in Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, has recently voiced his opposition to unification under the “one country, two-systems” formula.

It would probably take something of a miracle for the protest movement in Hong Kong to achieve its stated goals. Rather than risk a Tiananmen style confrontation, the authorities have taken a wait-and-see attitude, waiting for the movement to spend its force, or opponents to force it to retreat. There are signs already that the movement has run its course in clashes between the protestors and members of the general public weary of the disruption of life and business. It is suspected that the attackers included members of Triad gangs. Whom they might be serving is, for the moment, anybody’s guess.

What the next chapter might bring is uncertain, to say the least. It is unlikely that a movement that has been in the making for two decades will simply fade away into oblivion. The problems it set out to resolve are very real, and offer little sign of resolution, and the movement has proven its resilience through the years. The distinguished scholar of Hong Kong-Mainland relations at the City University of Hong Kong, Joseph Cheng Yu-shek,who is also an advocate of democracy, stated in a recent interview that, “All the protesters here and Hong Kong people know it is extremely unlikely the Chinese leaders will respond to our demands…. We are here to say we are not going to give up, we will continue to fight on. We are here because as long as we fight on, at least we haven’t lost.”

October 29, 2014
Who Big Data Thinks We Are (When It Thinks We're Not Looking)

a review of Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) (Crown, 2014)
by Cathy O’Neil
~
Here’s what I’ve spent the last couple of days doing: alternatively reading Christian Rudder’s new book Dataclysm and proofreading a report by AAPOR which discusses the benefits, dangers, and ethics of using big data, which is mostly “found” data originally meant for some other purpose, as a replacement for public surveys, with their carefully constructed data collection processes and informed consent. The AAPOR folk have asked me to provide tangible examples of the dangers of using big data to infer things about public opinion, and I am tempted to simply ask them all to read Dataclysm as exhibit A.

Rudder is a co-founder of OKCupid, an online dating site. His book mainly pertains to how people search for love and sex online, and how they represent themselves in their profiles.

Here’s something that I will mention for context into his data explorations: Rudder likes to crudely provoke, as he displayed when he wrote this recent post explaining how OKCupid experiments on users. He enjoys playing the part of the somewhat creepy detective, peering into what OKCupid users thought was a somewhat private place to prepare themselves for the dating world. It’s the online equivalent of a video camera in a changing booth at a department store, which he defended not-so-subtly on a recent NPR show called On The Media, and which was written up here.

I won’t dwell on that aspect of the story because I think it’s a good and timely conversation, and I’m glad the public is finally waking up to what I’ve known for years is going on. I’m actually happy Rudder is so nonchalant about it because there’s no pretense.

Even so, I’m less happy with his actual data work. Let me tell you why I say that with a few examples.

Who Are OKCupid Users?

I spent a lot of time with my students this summer saying that a standalone number wouldn’t be interesting, that you have to compare that number to some baseline that people can understand. So if I told you how many black kids have been stopped and frisked this year in NYC, I’d also need to tell you how many black kids live in NYC for you to get an idea of the scope of the issue. It’s a basic fact about data analysis and reporting.

When you’re dealing with populations on dating sites and you want to conclude things about the larger culture, the relevant “baseline comparison” is how well the members of the dating site represent the population as a whole. Rudder doesn’t do this. Instead he just says there are lots of OKCupid users for the first few chapters, and then later on after he’s made a few spectacularly broad statements, on page 104 he compares the users of OKCupid to the wider internet users, but not to the general population.

It’s an inappropriate baseline, made too late. Because I’m not sure about you but I don’t have a keen sense of the population of internet users. I’m pretty sure very young kids and old people are not well represented, but that’s about it. My students would have known to compare a population to the census. It needs to happen.

How Do You Collect Your Data?

Let me back up to the very beginning of the book, where Rudder startles us by showing us that the men that women rate “most attractive” are about their age whereas the women that men rate “most attractive” are consistently 20 years old, no matter how old the men are.

Actually, I am projecting. Rudder never actually specifically tells us what the rating is, how it’s exactly worded, and how the profiles are presented to the different groups. And that’s a problem, which he ignores completely until much later in the book when he mentions that how survey questions are worded can have a profound effect on how people respond, but his target is someone else’s survey, not his OKCupid environment.

Words matter, and they matter differently for men and women. So for example, if there were a button for “eye candy,” we might expect women to choose more young men. If my guess is correct, and the term in use is “most attractive”, then for men it might well trigger a sexual concept whereas for women it might trigger a different social construct; indeed I would assume it does.

Since this isn’t a porn site, it’s a dating site, we are not filtering for purely visual appeal; we are looking for relationships. We are thinking beyond what turns us on physically and asking ourselves, who would we want to spend time with? Who would our family like us to be with? Who would make us be attractive to ourselves? Those are different questions and provoke different answers. And they are culturally interesting questions, which Rudder never explores. A lost opportunity.

Next, how does the recommendation engine work? I can well imagine that, once you’ve rated Profile A high, there is an algorithm that finds Profile B such that “people who liked Profile A also liked Profile B”. If so, then there’s yet another reason to worry that such results as Rudder described are produced in part as a result of the feedback loop engendered by the recommendation engine. But he doesn’t explain how his data is collected, how it is prompted, or the exact words that are used.

Here’s a clue that Rudder is confused by his own facile interpretations: men and women both state that they are looking for relationships with people around their own age or slightly younger, and that they end up messaging people slightly younger than they are but not many many years younger. So forty year old men do not message twenty year old women.

Is this sad sexual frustration? Is this, in Rudder’s words, the difference between what they claim they want and what they really want behind closed doors? Not at all. This is more likely the difference between how we live our fantasies and how we actually realistically see our future.

Need to Control for Population

Here’s another frustrating bit from the book: Rudder talks about how hard it is for older people to get a date but he doesn’t correct for population. And since he never tells us how many OKCupid users are older, nor does he compare his users to the census, I cannot infer this.

Here’s a graph from Rudder’s book showing the age of men who respond to women’s profiles of various ages:

We’re meant to be impressed with Rudder’s line, “for every 100 men interested in that twenty year old, there are only 9 looking for someone thirty years older.” But here’s the thing, maybe there are 20 times as many 20-year-olds as there are 50-year-olds on the site? In which case, yay for the 50-year-old chicks? After all, those histograms look pretty healthy in shape, and they might be differently sized because the population size itself is drastically different for different ages.

Confounding

One of the worst examples of statistical mistakes is his experiment in turning off pictures. Rudder ignores the concept of confounders altogether, which he again miraculously is aware of in the next chapter on race.

To be more precise, Rudder talks about the experiment when OKCupid turned off pictures. Most people went away when this happened but certain people did not:

Some of the people who stayed on went on a “blind date.” Those people, which Rudder called the “intrepid few,” had a good time with people no matter how unattractive they were deemed to be based on OKCupid’s system of attractiveness. His conclusion: people are preselecting for attractiveness, which is actually unimportant to them.

But here’s the thing, that’s only true for people who were willing to go on blind dates. What he’s done is select for people who are not superficial about looks, and then collect data that suggests they are not superficial about looks. That doesn’t mean that OKCupid users as a whole are not superficial about looks. The ones that are just got the hell out when the pictures went dark.

Race

This brings me to the most interesting part of the book, where Rudder explores race. Again, it ends up being too blunt by far.

Here’s the thing. Race is a big deal in this country, and racism is a heavy criticism to be firing at people, so you need to be careful, and that’s a good thing, because it’s important. The way Rudder throws it around is careless, and he risks rendering the term meaningless by not having a careful discussion. The frustrating part is that I think he actually has the data to have a very good discussion, but he just doesn’t make the case the way it’s written.

Rudder pulls together stats on how men of all races rate women of all races on an attractiveness scale of 1-5. It shows that non-black men find their own race attractive and non-black men find black women, in general, less attractive. Interesting, especially when you immediately follow that up with similar stats from other U.S. dating sites and – most importantly – with the fact that outside the U.S., we do not see this pattern. Unfortunately that crucial fact is buried at the end of the chapter, and instead we get this embarrassing quote right after the opening stats:

And an unintentionally hilarious 84 percent of users answered this match question:

Would you consider dating someone who has vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people?

in the absolute negative (choosing “No” over “Yes” and “It depends”). In light of the previous data, that means 84 percent of people on OKCupid would not consider dating someone on OKCupid.

Here Rudder just completely loses me. Am I “vocalizing” a strong negative bias towards black women if I am a white man who finds white women and Asian women hot?

Especially if you consider that, as consumers of social platforms and sites like OKCupid, we are trained to rank all the products we come across to ultimately get better offerings, it is a step too far for the detective on the other side of the camera to turn around and point fingers at us for doing what we’re told. Indeed, this sentence plunges Rudder’s narrative deeply into the creepy and provocative territory, and he never fully returns, nor does he seem to want to. Rudder seems to confuse provocation for thoughtfulness.

This is, again, a shame. A careful conversation about the issues of what we are attracted to, what we can imagine doing, and how we might imagine that will look to our wider audience, and how our culture informs those imaginings, are all in play here, and could have been drawn out in a non-accusatory and much more useful way.

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Cathy O’Neil is a data scientist and mathematician with experience in academia and the online ad and finance industries. She is one of the most prominent and outspoken women working in data science today, and was one of the guiding voices behind Occupy Finance, a book produced by the Occupy Wall Street Alt Banking group. She is the author of “On Being a Data Skeptic” (Amazon Kindle, 2013), and co-author with Rachel Schutt of Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline (O’Reilly, 2013). Her Weapons of Math Destruction is forthcoming from Random House. She appears on the weekly Slate Money podcast hosted by Felix Salmon. She maintains the widely-read mathbabe blog, on which this review first appeared.

Back to the essay

October 8, 2014
June Fourth at 25: Forget Tiananmen, You Don’t Want to Hurt the Chinese People’s Feelings – and Miss Out on the Business of the New “New China”!

by Arif Dirlik

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Twenty-five years ago, in the early hours of June 4, the people’s government in Beijing turned its guns on the people of the city who had risen in protests that spring to express their frustration with Party despotism and corruption. The refusal to this day to acknowledge the crime is matched by continued criminalization of those who still live under the shadow of Tiananmen, and with courage continue to pursue the goals it had put on the political agenda – some from within the country, others from exile. The Tiananmen democracy movement brought to a head the contradictions of “reform and opening” that had acquired increasing sharpness during the decade of the 1980s. The successful turn to global capitalism in the aftermath of the suppression has been at least as important as the censorship of memories in the “forgetting” of Tiananmen among the PRC population. In historical perspective, Tiananmen appears as one of a series of popular uprisings around the globe that have accompanied the globalization of neo-liberal capitalism. The discussion throughout stresses foreign complicity – including that of foreign China scholars and educational institutions – in covering up this open sore on so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Read the full article here.
in International Journal of China Studies
Vol. 5, No. 2, June/August 201 4, pp. 295-329

August 8, 2014