Jon,
Two things:
I really LIKE what you are doing, here.
..but.I don’t quite get it, yet. I think it’s closely related to my take on the IOWA thing, which was that the phenomenon of interest was our out rage that the democratic process hadn’t been so rigged that we could have the results before we put out the dog and brung in the cat (or was it put out the cat, and brung in the dog; even when I had cats and dogs, I never knew which), and gave the babies one more tuck before we ourselves went to bed. The funniest thing I ever heard was the 538 blog trying to use up the half hour they had booked with their audience. Instead of saying, “Sorry, folks, we got nothing; go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep, for once,” they tried to turn the fact that they had nothing into a political event warranting their prescribed time slot. I was almost as humiliating as when Rachel Maddow tried to turn a fragment of one of Trump’s tax returns into a 43 minute saga. If ever there were a case of the media tail wagging the political dog, this would be it.
Don’t get me wrong. I love these people. Am addicted to them. But it’s when your friends do stupid things that it REALLY hurts.
N
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Friday, February 7, 2020 12:55 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!
My intention in drawing attention to critical application
development is an attempt to deepen the discussion
around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around
app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears
to be the vulnerability which exists today because
programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who
never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church
meeting passes without a discussion of the precision
engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.
Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame
are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute
and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,
the federal government is confronted by the reality that a
phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically
challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this
powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures
which arrive at their target destinations almost without
fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified
indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second
to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can
have nice things.
In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system
of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,
a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing
here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that
Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we
speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable
we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.
Jon
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