s5e08: Peek Mode
0.0 Station Ident
4:13pm and taking a break from work (which mainly has consisted of various kinds of writing, today) to... do some more writing. But this is self-directed writing! I have been staring at the screen for at least 10 minutes trying to figure out what to do, and I think what I've figured out is: I need to take a break. So this is the break I'm taking.
1.0 Peek mode
Think of this as gently picking things up from the stream and having a look at them and then placing them back end.
1.1 Do what you were supposed to do
So, Jazmyn Latimer is one of the lead designers at ex-workplace and still-friends Code for America. Jazmyn showed off this thing today that "reads a photo of your state RAP sheet, determines eligibility, and auto-fills your record clearance petitions", and said that she was SUPER proud of it, and she should be because it's SUPER important and I did a little thread on why, but I've written it up again here:
Rehabilitation of offenders is a societal issue. It's something that the biggest we - the societal one - determined through the mechanisms of government that rehabilitating offenders is, in general a good idea. In this case, the social good and policy has already been identified - a desire for rehabilitation is validated, ratified and reinforced through a mechanism that enables offenders to achieve rehabilitation and be reintegrated into society.
It just so happens that, most of the time, the process to do so - the mechanism, the service that puts that policy and ratification into effect, is horrible. Sometimes, those mechanisms can be so horrible (as in: obscure, difficult to use, strict in accepting input, etc) that they have the effect of deterring and thus frustrating the original intended (ratified) outcome!
(Some people may argue that this is the demos, the will of the people re-asserting itself, that *some* people disagree with this social goal and that bad implementation is their way of having their voice and opinion both heard and put into practice).
Well. The best thing about a project like Jazmyn's is that it shows how tech meets an existing and ratified *responsibility* to society in a significantly better, more humane way. Doing that shows how "we" actually want to solve the problem and reach the goal. One thing that flows out of this is that showing we can improve the horrible mechanisms through which already agreed and identified social goods has the side-effect of restoring trust in democratic social institutions. Or, in other words, no wonder people don't trust government if it doesn't, or can't, or can't competently do what it is supposed to be doing.
1.2 Grab-bag
* Software defined radios are in principle a good idea, but not when you do them like this.
* Via/with Azeem Azhar it turns out a potentially fatal attack for cryptocurrencies is to embed societally unacceptable content in their ledgers like, say, child abuse imagery, where strict criminal liability makes possession an instant criminal act [citation needed because it's been so long since I've done any criminal law]
* Great algowave fiction from Leigh Alexander: The Soft Truth which I've liberally highlighted
* LHC didn't find new *stuff*, which isn't necessarily a problem in some respects, but is if the only way you get expensive scientific instruments funded is by effectively promising new "stuff" type discoveries.
* I'm thinking about organizing a conference and am looking at other conferences. I like ORDcamp because it combines a curated (sorry) attendee list WITH an open call for attendance so you have less chance of being stuck in a horrible diversity black hole hell
* A sort of indie games supergroup is forming to make narrative game Neo Cab and it's relevant to me because studio Change Agency includes: Patrick Ewing, who introduced me to the term WANDER GAMES as an alternative to pejorative WALKING SIMULATOR, perennial Dan Hon's brain fan-favorites Leigh Alexander (ibid) and Robin Sloan.
* In Case You Missed It (sorry), a thread on Twitter about how some people think Star Trek: The Next Generation is The Best Thing about Voice User Interface Design and me, saying WELL ACTUALLY no, it isn't, because "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot" is "actually the name of a 16 million lines of code macro Picard wrote in the Academy to make sure he got a passable hot drink". I will probably write about this one more properly in the next newsletter.
* I won't tell you why I've been reading about policy laundering, just know that my alignment is chaotic good.
* I've seen things you wouldn't believe, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and the BBC commissioning/producing a game to help you spot fake news, everything old is new again, here's the actual game.
* From Cassie Robinson at friends-of-this-newsletter doteveryone, an essay titled "Putting users first is not the answer to everything" which kind of explains why I've started talking about "society's needs" instead of just "users' needs" in some contexts. There's the thought that in order to make sure commons are produced and protected, a level higher than just "user needs" needs, uh, to be explained and advocated for.
OKAY that is enough for now, I hope you're having a nice mid-week at least it's still mid-week here on the west coast and hey look at that we're still under 1,000 words.
THANKS EVERYONE and see you next time,
Dan