I just read this lovely essay by Tom Vanderbilt on Hans Monderman, traffic, distance, and the responsibility to care for one another. I am still turning it over because I have been wondering about what makes the small difference that tips us back and forth between from caring most for one another and defending ourselves. It’s often, of course, the difference between an explicit or legal contract and an implicit social contract. But what is it that makes the breach of those broad contracts irreversible? It’s the knowing I suppose, the knowledge of good and evil.

“There are so many things that can be forbidden. The stranger thing is that we believe everything that isn’t forbidden is allowed.”

That’s true. Why? Is this lack of explicit rules part of why we see a generosity online that is almost unthinkable in the real world? I can’t unknow that if I offer to fix the bit of my neighbor’s roof that’s raining bricks into my back yard, she can sue me if anything goes wrong. I can’t unknow how many people of my acquaintance have actually sued or been sued. Sometimes behaving with innocence is demonstrably safer than arming ourselves against all possible attack, but that’s calculated. It’s a matter of knowing the lower accident statistics of the traffic circle and still feeling afraid and wanting the traffic circle instead of the stoplight. In real life, even if we behave with the best intentions toward one another, we weigh the possibilities for humiliation (or worse) and consider the risk “rent to the ideal.”

‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence-trick is the work of the devil. (E. M. Forster again.)

Yet online the relationship between individuals is somehow still more innocent. Is it because the internet is still a frontier place? What will happen when there are suddenly sets of explicit rules for interacting with our peers? What will happen when the corporate drunk drivers take advantage of the generosity of individuals to swerve all over us? (Drugstore.com, give me one good reason why I should do unpaid work writing product reviews for you? I’ll do it if I damn well please. Stop harassing me.) Corporations are increasingly functioning in very personal spaces. No collective entity that exists to earn money, no matter how careful, can have the sensitivity of an individual to the nuances of these fluid, invisible agreements. Mostly they don’t even try, or worse– assume the rules simply don’t apply to them. Will we get burnt out and defensive? How long have we got? And what can we get done in the meantime?

Paul Ford is talking about editors and editing the web, and I think he’s getting at another twisty strand of this thing I’m thinking about as I keep coming back to the problem of how best for humans to make sense of data. There’s no way around it—computers are very good at finding patterns and humans are very good at finding meaning within those patterns. Computers are not so good at finding meaning in patterns. We keep trying to skip ahead, asking machines to find meaning for us, but the most momentous way to use the computation power available to us right now is to have human beings edit the patterns machines find in data, rather than to have human beings edit the data itself to make it more palatable to the machines in hopes that the machines will extract something important for us. Machines think humans always want single answers when really humans just as often want to be able to wonder about things, to ask half-baked questions on a hunch and select or reject patterns in the same way. We want to be able to guide the computations toward the meaning we’re looking for.

And to step sideways for a sec and come at the idea of meaning from a different direction; I have a fuzzy theory that the meaning we are looking for has a visceral component. We need to make a connection that maps the external world of patterns to our bodies somehow, and we have to do it for ourselves. Mitsu often talks with frustration about how even when we (both the big we of Society and the small we of me) have precisely the information we’re looking for, we are often unable to bring ourselves to use it, or maybe even to really and truly believe it. Financial information from a time before we were born is a fine example of this. No matter how relevant, we can’t quite trust it. For some reason, once things fall outside of a certain scale—too far before or after our lifetimes, too big or small in comparison to our bodies—we seem unable to internalize even information we rationally find sound.

Part of the reason I am so fascinated with genomic data and personal tracking data is that I see it as a link between the scale of our bodies and historical, geographic, and molecular events that we might not otherwise find meaningful. (Ferchrissake, I can’t seem to stop saying meaning.) But imagine (and this is a totally scifi example, but still), if I were able to relate a present physical sensation to a set of epigenomic markers which in turn were associated with an event that took place in a specific geographic location some forty years before I were born. That historical event, the descendants of the people involved, the location, everything surrounding that event and the cascade of consequences take on a new kind of urgency for me. They are literally part of me.

Dan Vorhaus gives a thorough history of the FDA and direct to consumer genetic testing. And here, he gets momentarily interviewed about the “safety and effectiveness and wisdom of personal genomics kits.” (Wait, how might these test kits harm consumers and what exactly are they supposed to effect? And wisdom! I keep seeing that astonishing conversation, as if we were discussing kindergarteners with sharp knives.)

The bottom line is that FDA regulation of genomics testing amounts to FDA regulation of genomic data. The interesting question is to whom that data belongs. And the answer is me! I can confidently say my genomic data belongs to me! I can choose to share it with my doctor or my health insurance company (hahaha!) or the rest of the world, but I’ll be damned if the FDA gets to make those decisions for me. This is not about medical treatments, this is about who owns the genomic description of my body. And eventually the epigenomic description of my body⁰¹ and the catalogue of the unique pattern of symbiotic microbes for whom I am the universe, and… The FDA ought to regulate medical therapies, including those based on genomic data, but regulating the morality and existence of data itself is really fraught. I suppose the problem is partially in the precedent of propagating my personal data (health records and lab work) throughout my healthcare provider’s and insurer’s paper and digital systems⁰² and only then dispensing bits to me more or less at the discretion of each, but I’ve never been convinced that’s very effective or safe. We need more than the legal right to extract own data from that labyrinth. We need the ability to acquire (or decline to acquire!) data about ourselves and to share it at our own discretion.

~

Lizzy Skurnick on blogging. She comes out swinging.

You link wrong. You’re not funny. Often, you’re boring. You think posts are something you “pitch”. You think posts should be timely, or related to news. You think other bloggers should respond to other bloggers, preferably in chin-stroking ways like, “I appreciate your thoughts, Gwendolyn, yet I…” You want headlines maximized for SEO. You want things to have a peg, you want to call sources for comments, you pester your readers for response instead of allowing readers to want to respond.

This kinds of fits with my growing discomfort around professional blogging as well. A few old timers manage to pull it off pretty elegantly as an end in itself (Good for you, Kottke!), but often the barrage of ads, SEO optimized headings, sponsored posts, and froth of affiliate links tweaks something in me that strengthens and exercises my capacity for cynicism. I don’t know what the answer is yet for how writers make a living writing online. But I don’t have to unravel it all logically within a taxonomy of carefully considered circumstances. It’s not a moral response. I just know that it does something I don’t like to me as a reader. I don’t ever want to slip from happy skepticism into anxious suspicion, and without giving it much thought, I avoid places where I have to breathe in all that stuff while I read. It smells bad. I wander off after not very long.