Tag: google

So wait, Google is pro censorship?

Sometimes one is confronted with an absurdity so self-evident that it defies an introductory sentence.  So, I wrote that sentence instead.  But what’s got me gobsmacked today is a story by Adam Sherwin writing for The Independent explaining that Google insisted the popular music site Drowned in Sound censor images of certain album covers on the grounds that they are “sexually explicit” and, therefore, violate existing policy that Google will not serve ads to sites with “adult or mature content.” Really?  Last I checked, half of Google’s arguments for failing to address matters like contributing to piracy were based on a stance against censorship.

First of all, I can login to YouTube right now, search the word sex, and get scads of results with sexually explicit thumbnails.  In fact, many of these thumbnails link to videos that are not so explicit as the pictures imply. So, I guess it’s okay for Google to use pornographic thumbnails in a bait-and-switch ploy to get users to click on videos that are ad supported, but if an artist depicts the naked human form (newsflash, artists do this sometimes) in a painting or other medium, then Google can arbitrarily label it “adult mature content” and out of bounds? I know one man’s art is another’s pornography, and this subjectivity is an important standard for the protection of free speech; but somehow mainstream advertisers seem to know pornography when they see it because you won’t find their brands on actual pornographic sites (I asked a friend).  But consider this…

One of the covers targeted by Google for censorship was for the album OH (Ohio) by the band Lambchop.  The irony in this case is pretty thick considering the painting depicting two lovers in bed in the foreground with a scene of police brutality through the window in the background evokes of one of the most famous visual themes in the history of Western art — that of Olympia.  Probably the most well-known and most overly-adapted Olympia is Manet’s painting of the nude courtesan, which debuted in 1865.  It was scandalous in its time, not so much for the nudity but for the blatant depiction of a prostitute looking right at the viewer. The Lambchop cover is a painting by artist Michael Peed, a friend and former professor of frontman Kurt Wagner, and Peed references the familiar Manet composition to create a scene that is provocative in our times.  The counterpoint between the intimacy of the lovers and the abuse by the police is a wry statement that one can interpret as one may choose, but that it should be censored by Google of all entities has got to at least make you wonder what all their pro-culture, pro-speech horse shit is all about.  Take this for what it’s worth, but the censored version with pixel blurs over the “naughty bits” inadvertently makes an even more disturbing statement about America — that sex remains offensive while police brutality is not.  Well played, Company That Shall Not Be Evil.

We should not lose sight of the significance of an entity like Google exerting its influence, even in this small case.  An individual advertiser may, and should, choose what kind of media associations best suit its brand.  You probably won’t see Betty Crocker commercials during Adult Swim, for instance.  But should an ad service business — and in this case the only ad service business —  be entitled to arbitrarily label creative works “sexually explicit” and requiring censorship? If Peed’s painting meets that definition, then so does nearly every nude in every museum and gallery in the world. I thought the Internet was the proverbial garden of free expression.  I also thought Google was just a neutral highway that has neither interest in nor responsibility for the manner in which users drive.

Admittedly, even for Google-scale hypocrisy, it is an enigmatic choice to commit such a blatant act of censorship where there isn’t even a hint of gray area regarding the works in question.  Is this the result of killjoy bots?  Or is it a sign that Google will soon be throwing even more prudish sops to its new conservative friends among DC influence-peddlers?  No matter what the thinking (and I use that word generously) may be in this case, the disturbing implications of the precedent cannot be overstated.  To be outside the Google universe is to be effectively off the web, at least as far as monetization goes. This is an absurd amount of power for any single company to wield. And seeing as we are no longer able to distinguish between corporations and people in the United States, I’m not at all ready to let the whims of centaurs in Silicon Valley or anywhere else define what it means to be indecent.

Will privacy become a right?

What matters more to you, the right to privacy or the right to know?  Or is it even reasonable to believe these rights are in conflict with one another? While there is some dispute as to whether or not the 4th Amendment implies a constitutional right of privacy in the United States, it seems that we have generally believed that average citizens enjoy an expectation of privacy while public figures cede at least some of that right by choosing to become public figures.  Of course, even when it comes to public figures, it would be nice to see exposures of their folly constrained by a measure of decency and an assessment of social relevance; but human nature being what it is, sex scandal trumps insider trading every time.  Regardless, long gone are the days when we average Americans can remain passive spectators in the debate about how much privacy invasion is too much.

In this brief editorial on Slate, writer and Yale Law Fellow, Emily Bazelon cites a case in Germany where a court ruled in favor of a woman who wanted an ex-boyfriend to remove erotic photos and videos of her from his computer.  This comes a little less than a month after the European Court of Justice ruled that European citizens have a “right to be forgotten” online, giving individuals power to demand removal of personal data from companies like Google (which is to say Google).  Needless to say, Google was not happy about this ruling because asking that company to remove data is like asking Augustus Gloop to get his head out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river.  True to form, the company resorted to the standard PR tactic of making its problems our problems, claiming that giving individuals this right to be forgotten chills free speech and threatens the public’s right to know about the very people (e.g. corrupt politicians) who deserve scrutiny.  These arguments are presumably directed at the American public, where we do in fact value free speech above principles of privacy, defamation, and slander.  Of course, the position could not be more hypocritical coming as it is from an elite crowd of billionaires whose dealings deserve much scrutiny and who are also exceptionally good at covering their own digital tracks.

To Emily Bazelon’s point, however, now that we’re all a little famous or could be made famous, or infamous, by way of communication as innocuous as a bullshit tweet to something more invasive and abusive like revenge porn, the question is whether or not we Americans will take a cue from Europe on the limits of speech when basic human decency is at stake.  For anyone who doesn’t know, revenge porn refers to libraries of erotic material captured or shared consensually between a couple, and after a breakup, the ex-boyfriend (so far, it’s the men) “shares” his collection of homemade erotic bits on a website that promotes this kind of material and, of course, monetizes it all with ad dollars.  Concerns over this type of use is one reason the woman in Germany likely sought to have the material removed from her ex’s computer, but even if he would not have done something as depraved as turn it into revenge porn, the case makes the point that once anything is recorded in the digital age, it’s a potential liability even if it isn’t broadly shared via social media.  We Americans may be used to a basic right of privacy; but it isn’t explicitly protected by law and so appears to be something we’re going to have to insist upon if we really want it.

In light of my recent post about automatic copyrights for non-professionals, it’s worth noting that the German court did not consider the ex-boyfriend’s copyright interests in the photos and videos to be more important than the rights of the woman depicted in these images.  The court made the determination that these media were not professional photos that were in any way related to the ex-boyfriend’s business and that no such business relationship existed with regard to the recording of the images.  As such, it seems like common sense and common decency to find in favor of the woman, although an American court might have ruled the other way. In that post, I made the case that Americans’ interest in automatic copyrights remains a functional hedge against private or corporate misuse of amateur media like personal photographs, and I stand by that position.  For instance, in a case in which the subject is also the photographer, copyright can and has been used (e.g. DMCA) to take down revenge porn. What’s interesting about the German ruling, though, is that the court ordered the media removed from the boyfriend’s possession despite the fact he had not done anything with the assets in the form of an inappropriate distribution.  The rationale suggests the plaintiff in this case has the right to remove even the potential of misuse by her ex rather than trust indefinitely that he won’t  have too many Mojitos one night and decide she broke his heart and deserves to be punished for it.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s one way in which copyright might be due for some nuanced reform in the digital age — that it should be bound by the rights of individuals who grant use of their likenesses in one context but not in all contexts — a right to be forgotten, if you will.  But you’re not going to hear the self-proclaimed copyright reformers from Silicon Valley make this argument.

Coup du Jour – Eric Schmidt as CEO of America?

Image by RienkPost

In case you missed it, OWS co-founder, now Google software engineer, Justine Tunney is responsible for a petition calling for a coup d’etat that would hand over administrative authority of the United States to the tech industry and appoint Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.  Whether Tunney is trying to be amusing, or she’s deranged, or she’s just another Twitter attention junkie, nobody is taking her too seriously if the comment section below the article in The Guardian is any indication.  In fact, this is one of those side-show moments that I questioned commenting on at all except for the unfortunate fact that so much of what now passes for discourse in the world  comprises so many side shows that mutate into headlines and round-table discussions on once-respectable news programs.  Even more relevant, though, is that even if Tunney herself is dismissible, her appeal might actually touch a few very real nerves running though the body of the American electorate.

For starters, the suggestion that any business leader ought to be president, that the presidency itself is like being a CEO, is a well-entrenched conservative idea also popular with many right-leaning libertarians.  Given that one of the universal complaints about government is that the elected are terrible stewards of “our money,” it’s a natural, albeit narrow-minded, instinct to want to elevate a successful business operator to the presidency so that he or she can “get our house in order.” On purely theoretical grounds, I have always quarreled with this premise because a corporation is not a democracy — I don’t care how flat you say your org chart is — so much as it is a benign dictatorship, usually designed to excel in a limited number of core competencies in the service of profitability.  Democracy isn’t efficient, giving everyone a voice isn’t efficient, balancing competing interests within a nation isn’t efficient; but inefficiency is one of the prices we pay for free speech, the right to redress the government, the right to assemble and organize, and so on.

Conversely, CEOs are conditioned toward efficiency and toward meeting quarterly goals for their shareholders.  As such, CEOs are not necessarily the best collaborators; they’re often not multi-dimensional thinkers; they frequently have egos way too big for Washington (which is saying something); and they’re not particularly oriented toward balancing the needs of the diverse and quarrelsome many. There are and have been CEOs who meet these criteria, but my point is that a strong P&L statement alone does not make a good resume for Leader of the Free World.  Interestingly though, while Tunney is standing on this weatherbeaten plank of the GOP, I think she’s simultaneously echoing sentiments among the left and libertarian left, who have come to think of technologies like social media as the antidote to corporate/government corruption and incompetence.  And this is where the bizarre confluence of Occupy zeal and the idea of appointing a less-than-one-percenter like Eric Schmidt as national leader might actually make some twisted sense in certain minds.

Occupy, after all, was a YouTube protest that was unfortunately almost as fleeting as that damn “What Does the Fox Say” video, and just about as likely to effect any tangible change in the world. At its core, I thought OWS began as a legitimate response to a genuine problem — wealth consolidation and the many systemic ways in which this economic cancer, eating away the middle class, is protected and perpetuated in the U.S.   But Occupy rather quickly manifest as the proverbial rebel without a clue — yet another social media side show in which the lead stories became a handful of viral videos depicting excessive force by certain police officers instead of a narrative relating any kind of clear, advancing agenda.  Thanks in part to the ephemeral nature of social media and its tendency to provoke an increase in conspiracy theory, the story of Occupy became the story of who was trying to shut it down rather than what it was meant to accomplish. Think OWS today, let alone years from now, and what probably remains are a few images of cops misusing pepper spray.  Imagine if all you could say about the civil rights movement is that some cops sprayed people with fire hoses.

Like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Tea Party made Occupiers look like a bunch of fair-weather activists who seemed to think it was enough to conjure the illusion of a movement with all the trappings and also seemed to confuse mouse clicks with votes.  OWS generated images and buzz and “Likes” and a moment of fleeting outrage while the Tea Party got seats in the House of Representatives.  So, while Justine Tunney may be mockable for her hypocrisy, trying to trade on OWS bona fides from the rarefied heights of Googletopia and anointing the most corporate of corporate guys, the irony is that an event like OWS unwittingly does feed the pseudo-progressive trend toward a technocracy.  OWS was a functionally impotent movement with regard to addressing any serious issues, but one that simultaneously elevated the apparent relevance of citizens using smartphones and social media. By extension, this elevates the importance of the individuals who build those technologies.

In this sense occupy takes on an unintended second meaning.  While it was meant to express a contemporary sit-in whereby people occupy physical space as a form of protest, the millions of people passively engaged online were occupied in the sense that their attention was drawn particularly toward the aforementioned images of police misconduct.  While this is happening, the unseen irony is that the one percent of the one percent who own social media sites are saying “Ka-ching!” while many users are thinking, “Thank goodness for YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, or we would never know about these extraordinary (soon to be forgotten) events.”  Thus, I would argue that on at least a subconscious level, people come to think of a guy like Schmidt as a national leader of sorts.  It reminds me of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which the 19th Century man with his technological prowess is to be given a title that doesn’t quite acknowledge that he’s the most powerful person in the realm.  Arthur remains The King, Merlin remains The Wizard, and the technologically skilled Yankee is given the title The Boss.