Tag: Hobby Lobby

Owning One’s Data with Jennifer Lyn Morone (Podcast)

Jennifer Lyn Morone Part I
Jennifer Lyn Morone Part II

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are presently grappling with existential questions posed by big data and at the same time, considering the social implications of rulings by the supreme court in both Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.   In fact, I believe we have an unprecedented mandate at this point in history to more rigorously consider the distinction between human beings their inventions. The nature of existence itself is changing as we atomize experience into data that is bought and sold as a new commodity.  At the same time, many of us in the United States are concerned about the precedents set when corporate entities appear to be endowed with the same rights as living beings.  A corporation is a tool.  Technology is a tool.  But whether us makers are using these tools or they are using us is a question yet to be answered. And examination includes choices about personal privacy and the economic value of ourselves as expressed in a body of data.

Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc from jennifer morone on Vimeo.

In this podcast, I talk with Jennifer Lyn Morone, who is in the start-up phase of bringing to market Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Incorporated.  An American artist who has lived in Europe for more than a decade, Morone has chosen to address these social, economic, and existential questions with a venture that is part experiment, part cultural statement, and part business.  By incorporating herself, Jennifer Lyn Morone will now be the CEO of Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc., and that means literally treating her life, her experiences, her knowledge, even her biological data, as a set of assets to be fully managed and monetized at the discretion of the corporation.  This Fall, Morone will begin using a combination of cameras and data recording technology to track her activities and store information on servers controlled by the corporation.  I think this is not going to be just another example of web-enabled voyeurism.  Morone is serious about the business venture, and she’s eager to share what she learns as she explores the dual nature of being both a person and a corporation.

Visit Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. website.

Your rights are in my freedom.

It’s another Independence Day weekend, and I can’t help but notice that we find ourselves this year grappling with some unfortunate consequences of liberty run amok.  We’ve got open-carry nuts sporting assault rifles in department stores and coffee shops to prove how free they are; and we’ve got the supreme court granting business owners the right to discriminate against employees on the grounds that said discrimination can be considered the free exercise of religion.  These real-life manifestations are borne in the logic of narcissism in which the self-righteous individual believes in liberty that is not bound by the limits imposed by the rights of others. It is the same logic that says legalizing a same-sex marriage is an infringement on religious exercise.  And like it or not it is the same logic that attempts to absolve many sins of the digital age in the name of free expression.

It sounds good on paper, but in reality, freedom without limits isn’t freedom for anyone but the powerful, whether that power is derived by wealth, political influence, technological prowess, or violence.  On July 1, a debate was held at the American Enterprise Institute on the matter of intellectual property rights during which Mark Schultz of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason University said the following:

“If our only understanding of liberty is if I get to do whatever I darn well please, it is a five-year-old’s understanding. A grown-up understanding of liberty is ordered liberty, competing claims that need to be reconciled through a system.”

The underlying question in that debate was whether copyrights are a right or a privilege, but it is instructive that even in this academic forum on intellectual property, Schultz feels the need to affirm a definition of liberty that (he’s right) ought to be obvious to any adult. In short, liberty is not all about what we want.  One of the reasons I began writing about digital age issues and intellectual property is that many of the arguments used to rationalize negative social behaviors (e.g. piracy) are First Amendment arguments; and it seemed to me the right of free expression was being stretched beyond reason in ways that mirror the aberration of free religious exercise we saw this past week with the Hobby Lobby case.

Do women have a right to comprehensive health care, including contraception?  Yes, according to federal law, they do; but the supreme court just said they kinda don’t, that this right has been recast as a privilege to be offered at the discretion of an employer based on his personal moral code.  Many of us are hopping mad about this, and we should be, both in practice and in principle.  It is quite simply a grotesque distortion of the free exercise clause that sets a precedent begging for abuse by people in positions of power over individual workers.

But what about my colleague Mark Schultz debating copyrights with academic libertarians like Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who want to recast this longstanding right as a government granted privilege?  Copyright is less emotionally charged (and ultimately less critical) than the health of American women, but the false logic being applied is very similar, as would be the consequence in that the wealthy and powerful would ultimately win another victory over individual workers.

Central to the arguments made to eliminate or severely weaken copyrights is a claim that the rights of individual authors limit the right of free expression.  This is similar backward reasoning to “your right to contraception violates my right of religious expression,” and again it is an idea based in narcissism and backed by corporate interests.  We all are entitled to the right of free expression and the right of intellectual property protection, if we want the latter; so why give up either right when we can have both?  It’s as much a false dichotomy as religious freedom vs birth control.  It’s what happens when we can’t tell the difference between freedom and a free-for-all.  And in a free-for-all, the biggest bullies usually win.

Hobby Lobby: The Principles of Principals

There are certainly many troubling aspects of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case.  That the majority opinion rests on upholding the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act has been rightly criticized, particularly by democratic authors of that bill. The protection of religious freedom for individuals was never intended to extend to for-profit corporations, they say; and certainly this expansion of the RFRA has implications that go well beyond the sphere of a couple of franchises.  I am sure that I’m not alone in feeling that SCOTUS has awarded corporate owners far too much latitude to engage in discriminatory practices, but I also feel it’s worth noting that this decision comes at a terrible time, when some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations trade in a new commodity comprised of personal information.

If under the 1993 RFRA, an employer can refuse to pay for coverage of contraception for female employees, why does it not allow an employer to simply fire a woman for some other sin against said employer’s religious beliefs?  After all, the employer supports his employees with a salary, so why should he not be allowed to sever that support upon learning that a woman in his employ is pregnant out of wedlock or has terminated a pregnancy while in his employ or has bought contraception on her own — with the money he pays her dammit!  Sound crazy?  Well, this is a ruling predicated on crazy, and if RFRA can trump one federal law, why can’t it trump another?

If in fact this is the slippery slope on which we now stand, how long do we think it will take for employers (sincerely or insincerely “religious”) to acquire the kind of personal information that is implicitly now part of their purview?  The answer to that is no time at all.  Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al have been bundling whatever personal information we share into commodities bought sold by data brokers. Bought and sold by which entities?  Searchable according to what organizing principles?  I know from experience that, even pre-Internet, it took various companies about ten minutes to know my wife was pregnant with our first child and to start sending us coupons and other offers for baby products.  How long before networked systems and social media reveal a woman’s pregnancy termination or some other physiological, social, or sexual information that is none of an employer’s damn business?

Incorporation provides a number of opportunities and establishes a number of responsibilities, all of which are predicated on the fact that the business becomes an entity separate from its principals.  This ruling on Hobby Lobby invests non-human entities with the right of religious freedom while disenfranchising actual human beings from a newly enacted right to healthcare. That this event coincides with the loss of privacy and the commoditization of personal data ought to scare the hell out of everyone.