Tag: people

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People as corporations

Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and a host of other big companies in today’s “data-driven economy” share one thing in common: they make a living from harvesting personal data. Some of this data is freely given, perhaps too freely. More than 1.3 billion people have donated some of their most valuable personal information to Facebook in return for the ability to “like” and “share” cat photos. Amazon knows almost as much about its customers as they do. Twitter knows what you think and when you think it.imgres

Moreover, as the stuff in our lives increasingly goes online, the volume of data we actively or passively generate will explode. Firms such as Facebook already profit handsomely from the fact that its users are also its product: its “cost of materials” is close to zero largely because those users have no idea how much their data is worth. As Jaron Lanier, an insightful computer scientist, puts it, “the dominant principle of the new economy has been to conceal the value of information… We’ve decided not to pay most people for performing the new roles that are valuable in relation to the latest technologies. Ordinary people ‘share’, while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.” As a result, Mr Lanier fears “a massive disenfranchisement will take place.”

Such issues have long troubled Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American living in London (pictured). So to regain some ownership and control of her data (and other assets related to her existence) she decided to become Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc (JLM), registered like all savvy corporations in Delaware. And what started out as an art project—her brief as part of a master’s degree at London’s Royal College of Art was to “design a protest”—is now transforming her into a humanoid/corporate hybrid.

JLM is an intriguing attempt to establish the value of an individual in a data-driven economy. As Ms Morone’s business plan describes it, JLM “derives value from three sources, and legally protects and bestows rights upon the total output of Jennifer Lyn Morone.” Those sources are the accumulation, categorisation and evaluation of data generated as a result of Ms Morone’s life; her experience and capabilities, offered as biological, physical and mental services; and the sale of her future potential in the form of shares. Crimped into a male business suit that clearly does not fit—perhaps to stress that this is not a natural role for her—Ms Morone describes her thinking in this brief video.

It may not be her natural role, but she is taking it pretty seriously. When JLM is fully operational this autumn, all the data generated by her life will be captured and stored on her own servers—an attempt to take back control of information that, until now, has been co-opted by corporations and other entities (hello NSA). To do this, Ms Morone and a group of computer-geek friends are developing a multi-sensor device that she will wear almost all the time (“it’s not yet waterproof,” she muses), and a software application known as the Database of Me, or DOME, which will store and manage all the data she generates. JLM’s eventual goal is to create a software “platform” for personal-data management; companies and other entities would be able to purchase data from DOME via the platform, but how they could use it would be limited by encryption or data-tagging. The software, then, would act as an automated data broker on behalf of the individual. Continue reading “People as corporations”

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Children’s book apartheid

Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

Walter Myers writes in the New York Times that “Reading came early to me, but I didn’t think of the words as anything special. I don’t think my stepmom thought of what she was

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doing as more than spending time with me in our small Harlem apartment.

From my comfortable perch on her lap I watched as she moved her finger slowly across the page. She probably read at about the third grade level, but that was good enough for the True Romance magazines she read. I didn’t understand what the stories were about, what “bosom” meant or how someone’s heart could be “broken.” To me it was just the comfort of leaning against Mama and imagining the characters and what they were doing.

“Later, when my sisters brought home comic books, I got Mama to read them to me, too. The magazines and comics pushed me along the road of the imaginative process. When I got my first books — “The Little Engine That Could,” “Bible Stories for Every Day,” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” — I used them on the same journeys. In the landscape of my mind I labored as hard as I could to get up the hill. I stood on the plain next to David as he fought Goliath, and tasted the porridge with Goldilocks.

“As a teenager I romped the forests with Robin Hood, and trembled to the sound of gunfire with Henry in “The Red Badge of Courage.” Later, when Mama’s problems began to overwhelm her, I wrestled with the demons of dealing with one’s mother with Stephen Dedalus in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” But by then I was beginning the quest for my own identity. To an extent I found who I was in the books I read. I was a person who felt the drama of great pain and greater joys, whose emotions could soar within the five-act structure of a Shakespearean play, or find quiet comfort in the poems of Gabriela Mistral. Every book was a landscape upon which I was free to wander.

“In the dark times, when my uncle was murdered, when my family became dysfunctional with alcohol and grief, or when I realized that our economics would not allow me to go to college, I began to despair. I read voraciously, spending days in Central Park reading when I should have been going to school. Continue reading “Children’s book apartheid”

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Pay gap isn’t going away

Reports recently released by the American Association of University People indicate a gender pay gap not only still exists in the American workforce but often reveals itself the moment people accept their first job.

“People working full time one year after college graduation are paid an average of 18 percent less than people also working full time one year after receiving a bachelor’s degree, according to “Graduating to a Pay Gap.”images-3

“Some of the difference may be because many people pursue majors and enter careers that offer less pay. Some of it could be caused by varying levels of salary negotiation skills or other factors. But in many cases, the study suggests, part of the gap results from gender alone.

“So many times people hear about the overall pay gap and say ‘That’s because people are making different choices,'” said Christianne Corbett, AAUW senior researcher and one of the report’s authors. “We were really trying to get at a group that was as close to the same as possible right out of college … and we still found a gap.” Continue reading “Pay gap isn’t going away”

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How economy is hitting older people

Young graduates are in debt, out of work and on their parents’ couches.

People in their 30s and 40s can’t afford to buy homes or have children.Retirees are earning nea

r-zero interest on their savings. Today’s New York times carries a sobering story about the way the economy is hitting people just under retirement age:

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“In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath. Continue reading “How economy is hitting older people”