There is no free lunch

Remember that old joke about laptop computers being heavy, and that deleting unnecessary files will make it light as a feather? Haha!

Go ahead and Google that joke, if you want.

Wait, maybe you should think twice before you do it.  Not because of the need to think, which is important.  But, for a completely different reason:

Every Google search comes at a cost to the planet. In processing 3.5 billion searches a day, the world’s most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet’s carbon footprint.

In the internet-of-things world of today, we forget that the internet is based on real world infrastructure and needs energy--a whole lot of it--to work.

“Almost nobody recalls that the internet is made up of interconnected physical infrastructures which consume natural resources,” [Joana] Moll writes as an introduction to the project. “How can such an evident fact become so blurred in the social imagination?”

In our daily lives, we rarely pause to consider how the good and services that we use are created.  Who makes tshirts? Where is the electricity coming from? It is always a combination of ignorance and apathy.

Despite the notion that the internet is a “cloud,” it actually relies on millions of physical servers in data centers around the world, which are connected with miles of undersea cables, switches, and routers, all requiring a lot of energy to run. Much of that energy comes from power sources that emit carbon dioxide into the air as they burn fossil fuels; one study from 2015 suggests internet activity results in as much CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry.

For Google, this infrastructure means about 0.01 kg per search request.

Of course, it is not just Google. The Frightful Five and others have to maintain servers and routers and whatever else all around the world.  Which is one of the reasons they also like places like Oregon where they set up their energy-hogging server farms.

Server farms all across the planet.

Ireland, which with Denmark is becoming a data base for the world’s biggest tech companies, has 350MW connected to data centres but this is expected to triple to over 1,000MW, or the equivalent of a nuclear power station size plant, in the next five years.
...
The data will be stored in vast new one million square feet or larger “hyper-scale” server farms, which companies are now building. The scale of these farms is huge; a single $1bn Apple data centre planned for Athenry in Co Galway, expects to eventually use 300MW of electricity, or over 8% of the national capacity and more than the daily entire usage of Dublin. It will require 144 large diesel generators as back up for when the wind does not blow.

The more connected we become, the more our energy needs, unless something is done dramatically different:

Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae.
In an update to a 2016 peer-reviewed study, Andrae found that without dramatic increases in efficiency, the ICT industry could use 20% of all electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. This would be more than any country except the US, China and India.

Don't trust all these?  Go ahead, do a Google search ;)

This post has been outsourced

No, not to China or India ;)

Remember this post from a few days ago?  That was published in the newspaper this past Tuesday.

I got a lovely email in response from a retired physician, who is mighty impressed.  And he wants me to have lunch with him.

But, that was not the only response.  Read, if you want, the comments at the end of my op-ed.  Not constructive a discussion though.

Today's paper includes two letters.  I have reproduced them here verbatim; this is the outsourcing that the title of this post refers to.

Here is letter #1:

I read Sriram Khé’s Sept. 6 column regarding climate change with a mixture of admiration and wonderment. Admiration for the obvious reason — he is a brilliant man — and wonderment that not only he, but anyone else these days, hardly mentions the 800-pound gorilla in dealing with climate change: overpopulation.
As I said before, Isaac Asimov said it best 50 years ago: “Either decrease the birth rate, or increase the death rate. Take your pick.” That was before the evidence regarding climate change was established. Given what we now know about climate change, the word now is must.

Despite the best attempts by two to engage with logic and evidence, the rest of the comments are like how the internet discussions are :(

Letter #2 is even  more interesting.

I cannot understand why The Register-Guard continues to print articles on its op-ed page that only point out our mistakes and do not offer solutions. In particular, I refer to “Keep your eye on India...,” published Sept. 6.
The author, Sriram Khe, was born in Chennai, India. His family obviously was wealthy enough to give him an education which allowed him to attend college in the United States. Does he go back to India, which is greatly in need? Instead he takes a position which can be filled by any number of the Oregonians who also applied for his teaching position at Western Oregon University in Monmouth. Khe is needed in India. India is the country to which he owes his loyalty and success.

If only the letter writer understood that I am a citizen of the US, and that my loyalty is to these United States!  Even more, as that pathologist friend once commented, I love Oregon way more than even native Oregonians do ;)

There's an awesome response that has been posted there:

This is one example of why I like the ability to make an instant comment on letters! I'm amazed at this churlish attack on Sriram Khe and his writing. If he were, for example a physician or engineer, I might agree he'd be more moral if he went back to India to help his people -- the idea of the "brain drain" which has so benefited the US comes to mind.
However, as a professor here he has the opportunity to share his unique world view with insular Oregonians, something I appreciate and I imagine most of his students at Monmouth also enjoy. There's a Big World out there and we need to understand it.

Meanwhile, regarding my original op-ed on climate change, yet another scientific analysis, which concludes that extreme weather events are tied to climate change.

Have a nice day, y'all ;)

On resisting the call of the sirens

I have blogged in plenty about my love-hate relationship with Facebook and, therefore, I will stay away from reciting the ten things I hate about Facebook.  Let me, instead, tell you what I did.

A few days ago, I thought it might be a great time to conduct an experiment--to go off Facebook for a week.  Just like that.  Without leaving any note on Facebook.

My hypothesis was that I would not miss anything by staying away from Facebook.  After all, if there was anything important, then friends--the real ones, that is--will email or text or even call me.  If the real friends wonder about my absence, then they will email or text or even call me inquiring if I am ok.  

What I did not expect was this: Facebook got worried that I was not logging in.  After a couple of days, the Facebook algorithm started bugging me with emails like this:

It is understandable that Facebook will care--the business model is based not merely on the number of users but on the time that users spend on Facebook.  What if quite a few more users behave like me and do not login for a few days?  That's not a user behavior that will work for the shareholders.

It is not merely Facebook.  A good chunk of the internet seems to be based on us wasting time.

The insidious, distracting suck of the Internet has become seemingly inescapable. Calling us from our pockets, lurking behind work documents, it’s merely a click away. Studies have shown that each day we spend, on average, five and a half hours on digital media, and glance at our phones 221 times.

And just like the tobacco industry that went after the human fascination for an addictive nicotine, the highly qualified programmers systematically write apps for us to waste our time:

Meanwhile, the developers of websites and phone apps all exploit human behavioral tendencies, designing their products and sites in ways that attract our gaze – and retain it.

Yep, they systematically cultivate this addictive behavior:

Content on the net isn’t only designed to grab our attention; some of it is specifically built to keep us coming back for more: notifications when someone replies to a posts, or power rankings based on up-votes. These cues trigger the reward system in our brains because they’ve become associated with the potent reinforcer of social approval.
Not surprisingly, Internet use is often framed in the language of addiction.

What might one then do, right?  Let me tell you how I have now worked it out with Facebook--I do not login unless I have something to post there that will appeal to my real friends.  Like when I posted this photograph of flowers from the friend:

Then, in a manner of veni, vidi, vici, I exit Facebook before its sirens can trap me there for a long stay.  Which is the kind of an approach that researchers also suggest--"the best trick is to commit ourselves to a different course of action in advance – with force, if necessary."

The key is that self-control and resisting temptation are not the same thing. Odysseus had one, but not the other.
Instead, good self-control was characterized by the ability to avoid temptations in the first place. We often think of self-control as the ability to white-knuckle our way through temptation, but studies such as this one indicate that self-control can also be as simple as planning ahead to avoid those traps.
The next time you need to get something done, consider precommitting to avoiding the Internet altogether. Like Odysseus, realize that if you find yourself facing temptation directly, the battle may already be lost.

If only I can make sure that students in high schools and colleges--at least those in my classes--will read all these and think this through.  But then I cannot even get them to pay attention to what I say--while standing right in front of them! Maybe I am not addictive ;)

Get ready ... for a lot of bullshit!

Ah, yes, after this topic, which is about the certainty that we all face, perhaps bullshit is one of my favorite topics.  After all, it takes a bullshitter to love bullshit ;)

People talk about the past golden age, like the golden age of cinema, or the golden age of cricket (no, not the bugs!).  We now live in a golden age, and of an interesting kind:

We are currently in a golden age of bullshit. The internet is awash with unchecked claims.

Well, I read that on the internet.  So, is that bullshit or the truth?  Isn't everything in the internet true anyway ;)

So, of course, curious people want to know who are the people who are most likely to believe the bullshit.  What is an individual’s propensity to believe in bullshit?  Develop "a Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR)" then.  What does the research show?

Summarizing the results, Pennycook, et al., write that “[people] more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to … conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”

If you believed that, you probably rank way high in the scale ;)

Seriously, that makes sense, right?  So, what can be done to make sure people will be lower in the SBR scale?

Basically, the goal here should be to get people to slow down and more carefully examine the information being presented to them. To scan it, in other words, for bullshit.

To be engaged and to examine the information is nothing but the rational, critical approach that science employs.  The scientific method.  

if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

The unfortunate aspect is that the very scientific method of questioning anything leads the people with high BSR to believe that scientific research is all bogus.  Science, on the other hand, sniffs out bullshit.  But, sometimes the scientific method cannot be enough to tackle bullshit.  Why?

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

You want a real example?  Think about anything that Donald Trump says at any of his rallies.  They are all bullshit.  Now, think about all the work that has to go into refuting the errors.  A huge magnitude of energy will be needed to refute his bullshit.  You will be barely into the process when a new day dawns and Trump would have generated more bullshit.

If it is the golden age of bullshit, then Trump is certainly the man of the hour.

Hopelessly addicted to you ...

It was class meeting unlike any other day.  No, I didn't receive any award.  No, the students did not sing my praises.

Why was that class meeting special?  Students were talking, and talking loudly with each other during the break.  It was noisy, in contrast to the quiet time that the breaks are when students work their smartphones.

Of course, I made sure I remarked about that as we resumed the discussions.

A hermit I am, but I worry a lot that we are rapidly moving away from face-to-face real-time conversations.  I worry about this not because I am a neo-Luddite;  but because my instincts tell me that the more we move away from face-to-face conversations, the more we lose whatever ability that we might have to empathize with fellow humans.  To me, erosion of empathy is a serious threat to what it means to be human.

In a rich review essay, Jacob Weisberg explores that empathy angle:

Why might too much digital participation be corroding empathy, whether online or offline?

It is complicated to summarize here; read the essay.

Digital technology and the internet are also messing us up in ways that we tend to not think about.  Remember the following quote from a few months ago?

“The Net,” Carr writes, “is by design an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. Frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”
Or as the economist and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon put it even more presciently in 1971, “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

That itself is not as worrisome as this: apps are designed to cause these interruptions and to get your time and attention.

Nir Eyal, offers a practical guide in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. A former game designer and professor of “applied consumer psychology” at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Eyal explains why applications like Facebook are so effective. A successful app, he writes, creates a “persistent routine” or behavioral loop. The app both triggers a need and provides the momentary solution to it. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” he writes. “Gradually, these bonds cement into a habit as users turn to your product when experiencing certain internal triggers.”
The financial value of an app is largely determined by how much time consumers spend using it, on the assumption that usage translates into advertising revenue.

 The Attention Economy, as Tristan Harris refers to it.

If product design has a conscience at the moment, it may be Tristan Harris, a former B.J. Fogg student at Stanford who worked until recently as an engineer at Google. In several lectures available on YouTube, Harris argues that an “attention economy” is pushing us all to spend time in ways we recognize as unproductive and unsatisfying, but that we have limited capacity to control. Tech companies are engaged in “a race to the bottom of the brain stem,” in which rewards go not to those that help us spend our time wisely, but to those that keep us mindlessly pulling the lever at the casino.

Harris wants us think about this way: we are like the casino gambling addicts at the slot machines.  The longer the casinos can retain the gamblers at the machines, the more money the house makes. Note here that the gamblers are not playing with hundred dollar bills--it is mostly coins they bet every time.  Nickels and dimes and quarters.  But, the longer they stay in the casino, those coins add up.  The more we get hooked onto to those time-consuming apps, the more "they" earn and the more we lose.

Weisberg ends the essay on a depressing note:

Aspirations for humanistic digital design have been overwhelmed so far by the imperatives of the startup economy. As long as software engineers are able to deliver free, addictive products directly to children, parents who are themselves compulsive users have little hope of asserting control. We can’t defend ourselves ...

The software guys (almost always guys!) are making sure the house will always win! :(

Only for the articles, ma'am. For real!

Last December, when I was in the old country, a middle-aged cousin in the extended family commented that his cohort of parents find the internet to be terrible for how it has made porn so easily accessible to their high school- and college-age children.  "Most of the time these kids go to the internet cafes only for this" he worried.

Life was easier when I was a kid, and then a college student.  There was no internet and no easy access to porn.  In the world that I inhabited, there were no porn magazines either, which is why some of the stories of reading porn that classmates joked about during the reunion surprised me.  But, their stories about porn were tamer than the sex and nudity of a typical "R" rated movie these days.

Porn is seemingly everywhere.  One has to be careful to click when visiting webpages, or typing the URL.  The run of the mill porn is free and unlimited, while one has to pay to read the NY Times after the freebie offerings!

This has had one good result though--Playboy is in financial trouble:

From a peak of 7.2m copies in November 1972, its circulation has shrunk to a mere 800,000 today.

Ah, yes, the "shrinkage" is for real ;)

So, Playboy is "reinventing the brand by banning full nudity from the Playboy website."

On October 13th Playboy Enterprises said that from March next year Playboy will not publish full nudity any more, though it will continue to show “sexy, seductive pictorials of the world’s most beautiful women”. It will also continue to choose a “Playmate of the Month” and hire a “sex-positive female” as a sex columnist. And it says it will go on publishing long-form journalism, interviews and fiction.
“The quality of the content was always overshadowed by the nude pictures,” says Americus Reed at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

What does the living American icon of feminism, Gloria Steinem, think about this?

it’s as if the NRA said we’re no longer selling handguns because now assault weapons are so available.

A good line ;)

So, about the abundance of porn that parents all over the world are worried about.

The more traditional critiques say that pornography is inherently degrading to women – or whoever happens to be the object of sexual activity – and fosters unrealistic expectations of sex. It decreases the quality of real relationships and the self-image of those involved – and increases negative sexual attitudes and actions. Porn-users compare real humans to the fantastical images, and either come out unimpressed and reluctant to have real sex, or, at worst, demanding the types of behaviours they see on screen, regardless of their desirability to their partner. One poll from the US Pew Research Center in 2007 quantified the feeling, finding that 70 per cent of Americans said pornography is harmful.
Do any of these criticisms hold water?

 A good question to ask, right?

After reviewing a bunch of research, the conclusion is:

The negative behaviours we blame on pornography, in other words, might have emerged no matter what; porn is perhaps more symptom than cause.

Porn is, to use my favorite Hitchcock phrase, a McGuffin!

The way to change that – and to change the negative effects such a misperception can have – isn’t to restrict or ban pornography. It’s to bring the discussion of sexual pleasure to the foreground, especially in sex-ed. ‘We need to supplement pornography with non-porn sexual education, so that porn becomes fantasy sex rather than a real-world template,’ Zhana Vrangalova, a psychologist at NYU who specialises in sexuality, told me. ‘We need to give people permission to enjoy sex. Until we do that, they will go to porn. Because you can’t kill curiosity.’

We cannot kill curiosity, which leads the young to the forbidden places in the old country.

This day ... two years ago (2)

(Re-posting from 2013)
In what seems like centuries ago, though it has been less than three decades, I came to USC for graduate studies.  Those days, work rules for us "aliens" were a lot less restrictive than they are now.  Thus, in order to supplement my meager graduate assistantship, I applied for a student worker position with the university's computing services.

My "home" at USC--the VKC and WPH buildings

The first day on the job, my supervisor--I think his name was Mike, who a year later had a horrible motorcycle accident that affected his motor and mental skills--took me around the facilities.  He led me to the inner sanctum and said something like, "here is our DARPA center."  And then explained that DARPA stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and how USC was one of the very few universities and agencies connected to its network.

That connection, network, was, of course, the internet.

Those were the primitive days of the internet.  It was well before the days of the graphic user interface of Windows, when knowing the DOS commands was enough to impress a few.  A couple of Unix commands made quite a few swoon with admiration.  Within this primitive internet were user groups, through which was how I came to know about Zia's death in Pakistan--almost a few minutes after the plane went down.  I loved reading the endless number of jokes on groups. I easily adopted the internet.  I downloaded files from FTP sites.  I graduated.  It was still the pre-www world.

And then came the web and Mosaic and Netscape and AOL and Internet Explorer.  The world changed in a hurry.  I was now at the mercy of AOL and the slow dialup modem.  Then the faster dialup. And then DSL broadband.  It is one heck of a different world now.

Even the best minds had a difficult time figuring out what all those meant.  As this essay in the New York Review of Books notes, even the mighty Paul Krugman was dead wrong when he wrote:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other,” the economist Paul Krugman wrote in 1998. “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

It is not Krugman's fault that he got it dead wrong.  It is a measure of how rapidly things have changed.  The future has never been this difficult to predict when even next year could be dramatically different.

The internet has created quite a few monsters along the way.  The ease with which data can be collected about you and me and the seven billion others is that Faustian Bargain that we didn't quite imagine thirty years ago. Even twenty years ago.

[Not] obvious was how the Web would evolve, though its open architecture virtually assured that it would. The original Web, the Web of static homepages, documents laden with “hot links,” and electronic storefronts, segued into Web 2.0, which, by providing the means for people without technical knowledge to easily share information, recast the Internet as a global social forum with sites like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and Instagram.
Once that happened, people began to make aspects of their private lives public, letting others know, for example, when they were shopping at H+M and dining at Olive Garden, letting others know what they thought of the selection at that particular branch ofH+M and the waitstaff at that Olive Garden, then modeling their new jeans for all to see and sharing pictures of their antipasti and lobster ravioli—to say nothing of sharing pictures of their girlfriends, babies, and drunken classmates, or chronicling life as a high-paid escort, or worrying about skin lesions or seeking a cure for insomnia or rating professors, and on and on.

I certainly did not imagine this when I got to the internet 26 years ago.  The life we now live would have been science fiction to me then. 

you are not only what you eat, you are what you are thinking about eating, and where you’ve eaten, and what you think about what you ate, and who you ate it with, and what you did after dinner and before dinner and if you’ll go back to that restaurant or use that recipe again and if you are dieting and considering buying a Wi-Fi bathroom scale or getting bariatric surgery—and you are all these things not only to yourself but to any number of other people, including neighbors, colleagues, friends, marketers, and National Security Agency contractors, to name just a few.

 When phrased thus, yes, it certainly would have been nothing but science fiction back then.  Back then as in a mere 26 years ago.  How crazy is that!  How scary is that!

How all this sharing adds up, in dollars, is incalculable because the social Web is very much alive, and we keep supplying more and more personal information and each bit compounds the others.

 Not only are supplying the data, others are also providing the data.  It is important to keep in mind that:

Data—especially personal data of the kind shared on Facebook and the kind sold by the state of Florida, harvested from its Department of Motor Vehicles records, and the kind generated by online retailers and credit card companies—is sometimes referred to as “the new oil,” not because its value derives from extraction, which it does, but because it promises to be both lucrative and economically transformative.
In a report issued in 2011, the World Economic Forum called for personal data to be considered “a new asset class,” declaring that it is “a new type of raw material that’s on par with capital and labour.” 

So, how much is this new raw material worth?  You see that reflected, for instance, in the market valuation of Facebook at more than 80 billion dollars--from the more than 800 million users there.  As the quantity and quality of this raw material increases, the value of Facebook will also increase--ironically, we the people make the company worth that much by providing the data voluntarily!  Facebook is merely one example.  Google, Amazon, the NSA, ...

while we were having fun, we happily and willingly helped to create the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, a web whose strings give governments and businesses countless threads to pull, which makes us…puppets. The free flow of information over the Internet (except in places where that flow is blocked), which serves us well, may serve others better. Whether this distinction turns out to matter may be the one piece of information the Internet cannot deliver.

Not really what I imagined the world would be towards the end of 2013 back in 1987 when I was taken around the computing facilities at USC.  A mere 26 years ago that was!

Have we reached digital obesity already?

I suspect that the idea of fasting happened upon humans when they worried that eating and drinking every day might make them forget the value and importance of food.  Further, the more they ate and drank the less they paid attention to their souls.  Thus, humans in different cultural contexts developed a system of fasting, usually within the religious contexts as well.

The cleansing detox programs like fasting, I like to imagine, date back to when humans began producing enough surplus for them to start building cities and creating what we refer to as civilizations.

As we materially progressed and prospered, the detox programs also took on different variations.  Food detox programs continue, of course.  Detox against shopping.  Against driving.  Against watching television.  Recall MTV's "Unplugged" program?  That was a detox of a different kind.

The latest along that is detox from social media and the internet itself.

There are now resorts that guarantee you that you won't be able to access the internet.  You hand over your gadgets when you check in and then for the rest of the stay there, well, you are on a digital detox.  The Travel Channel even suggests the best unplugged vacation places!  You prefer advice on that from the Wall Street Journal?

We forget that the internet and the digital applications are not the problem by themselves, writes this author at Wired.com:

We all know that social media is a mixed bag. Regular studies connect its use to anxiety, and episodes of depression. There are legitimate questions about its impact on our brains. But it has also transformed many tasks, made us more productive, and at times, helped us to feel more connected. Like any technology, it’s not the tool that poses the problem. It’s how we use that tool.

Even when acknowledging it, he writes about taking off from social media for the entire month of August.  He is off on a digital detox--his third annual treatment!

Meanwhile, over at the NY Times is this piece about "struggling to disconnect from our digital lives"

The first step for me this month will be to shore up and seal my digital borders. I have learned from too many failed experiments that there is no resisting the Pavlovian pull of a ping announcing a new email, the vibration of my phone or the seductions of the Internet once I call up even a single site.
The only way to avoid these interruptions, I have learned, is to turn them off completely. If something requires my urgent attention this month, my away message directs senders to a colleague, who knows how to reach me and also knows how much I hope he won’t try.
I’m painfully aware that letting go won’t happen easily. I’m a lab rat now, deeply accustomed to tapping that lever over and over for the tiny pellets of brief stimulation and shallow gratification that life on the Internet provides.

People have apparently been driven so much into anxiety thanks to being connected 24x7 that they are willing to pay money to get away from it all.  Or, they even sign up for the "Sabbath manifesto" and get away from all gadgets and technology on the "national day of unplugging."   I want to tell them all that they can run but cannot hide!  It is in your head!

I have my own routines to make sure I don't become a gadget zombie. But, I cannot imagine ever going on the detox route.  I have never been a fan of fasting; it is all in the moderation.  As they say in my part of the old country, "அளவுக்கு மிஞ்சினால் அமிர்தமும் நஞ" (the idea translates to "even the divine nectar can become a poison if one exceeds the limit.)  I buy European butter that is rich in fat.  The cream cheese that I buy is full fat.  I buy chocolates and gelato.  Because, I am convinced that it is in how much of those I consume and when.  Consumed appropriately the European butter is the best thing ever on warm sourdough bread.  There are few things in life more delightful than chocolate melting away in the mouth.  But then I don't do that every single meal.

That's the same with digital consumption too.  Yes, it is a consumption; as the author of the NY Times essay put it:

it’s as if I’m sitting in front of a bowl of Doritos or Hershey’s Kisses and compulsively consuming them, except in this case, it’s bytes, not bites. The more of them I take in, the more dissatisfied and hungrier I feel.

Perhaps moderation is not easy for us humans.  Digital fasting is, thus, merely the latest of the forced removal of self from consumption.  Who knows what comes next!

Racists like us. Our robotic future!

Were you like me who guffawed a lot a few years ago when a Google search for "miserable failure" led to this?

Soon after that, Google modified its algorithm and the laughter subsided.  But, the fundamental problem itself continues.

What's the problem?  Remember all my posts (like here) worrying that the searches that do, the photographs that we tag with people's names, our interactions with voice-activated features, are all how the machines learn in order to become better and better?  I.e., we provide the data, which eventually becomes the basis for the "brain" for the machines, and we then turn around and ask questions to which machines provide the answers.

Aha, now you see the problem, don't you?

Latest exhibit: our racism means that the machines become racist?  We--not you the reader nor me the blogger--but the collective we are apparently racist folks in how we do searches.

Do you see the huge problem in the graphic below, which is a Google map of the White House?

Source

What happened?

It was discovered that when searching for “n***a house” and “n***a king,” Maps returned a surprising location: the White House.

It is one thing to laugh at the result of a search for "miserable failure" but another when it takes a sharp racist turn.

BTW, it was not only racism:

A search for “slut’s house” led to an Indiana women’s dorm.

What's going on?  "the internet itself is racist and degrading":

“Certain offensive search terms were triggering unexpected maps results, typically because people had used the offensive term in online discussions of the place,” wrote Jen Fitzpatrick, VP of Engineering & Product Management. “This surfaced inappropriate results that users likely weren’t looking for.”

The more we users had referred to the White House as the place where a N*a lives, the more the machines learn that association and then they repeat that to us.

The type of invective that led to this more recent Google Maps grotesqueness, though, isn’t something you can simply flip a switch to turn off, because it’s woven into the fabric of the internet itself. Essentially, we’re making internet algorithms racist.

This is truly atrocious, and not at all funny like the old "miserable failure" search because:

And it’s important to understand that while the technical function of producing the recent racist results are similar to how a Googlebomb works, there’s one very big fundamental difference: A Googlebomb is calculated. A group of people decided they wanted to game the “santorum” results and made it happen. In the case of the White House and other offensive Maps searches, the algorithm wasn’t subject to a coordinated effort, it just gathered up all the data the internet could provide, and the internet provided trash.

Yep, nobody was orchestrating a campaign.  The machines simply picked up our usage--they learn really well!

In addition to such racist behavior being despicable, we also need to keep this in mind:

Google doesn’t show us the world; just a curated version that it thinks we want to see.

What it shows is really ugly.

If only the internet users were really just lovable dogs!

Source

Are you a puppet worth $100 to Facebook? Or more?

In what seems like centuries ago, though it has been less than three decades, I came to USC for graduate studies.  Those days, work rules for us "aliens" were a lot less restrictive than they are now.  Thus, in order to supplement my meager graduate assistantship, I applied for a student worker position with the university's computing services.

My "home" at USC--the VKC and WPH buildings

The first day on the job, my supervisor--I think his name was Mike, who a year later had a horrible motorcycle accident that affected his motor and mental skills--took me around the facilities.  He led me to the inner sanctum and said something like, "here is our DARPA center."  And then explained that DARPA stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and how USC was one of the very few universities and agencies connected to its network.

That connection, network, was, of course, the internet.

Those were the primitive days of the internet.  It was well before the days of the graphic user interface of Windows, when knowing the DOS commands was enough to impress a few.  A couple of Unix commands made quite a few swoon with admiration.  Within this primitive internet were user groups, through which was how I came to know about Zia's death in Pakistan--almost a few minutes after the plane went down.  I loved reading the endless number of jokes on groups. I easily adopted the internet.  I downloaded files from FTP sites.  I graduated.  It was still the pre-www world.

And then came the web and Mosaic and Netscape and AOL and Internet Explorer.  The world changed in a hurry.  I was now at the mercy of AOL and the slow dialup modem.  Then the faster dialup. And then DSL broadband.  It is one heck of a different world now.

Even the best minds had a difficult time figuring out what all those meant.  As this essay in the New York Review of Books notes, even the mighty Paul Krugman was dead wrong when he wrote:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other,” the economist Paul Krugman wrote in 1998. “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

It is not Krugman's fault that he got it dead wrong.  It is a measure of how rapidly things have changed.  The future has never been this difficult to predict when even next year could be dramatically different.

The internet has created quite a few monsters along the way.  The ease with which data can be collected about you and me and the seven billion others is that Faustian Bargain that we didn't quite imagine thirty years ago. Even twenty years ago.

[Not] obvious was how the Web would evolve, though its open architecture virtually assured that it would. The original Web, the Web of static homepages, documents laden with “hot links,” and electronic storefronts, segued into Web 2.0, which, by providing the means for people without technical knowledge to easily share information, recast the Internet as a global social forum with sites like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and Instagram.
Once that happened, people began to make aspects of their private lives public, letting others know, for example, when they were shopping at H+M and dining at Olive Garden, letting others know what they thought of the selection at that particular branch of H+M and the waitstaff at that Olive Garden, then modeling their new jeans for all to see and sharing pictures of their antipasti and lobster ravioli—to say nothing of sharing pictures of their girlfriends, babies, and drunken classmates, or chronicling life as a high-paid escort, or worrying about skin lesions or seeking a cure for insomnia or rating professors, and on and on.

I certainly did not imagine this when I got to the internet 26 years ago.  The life we now live would have science fiction to me then.

you are not only what you eat, you are what you are thinking about eating, and where you’ve eaten, and what you think about what you ate, and who you ate it with, and what you did after dinner and before dinner and if you’ll go back to that restaurant or use that recipe again and if you are dieting and considering buying a Wi-Fi bathroom scale or getting bariatric surgery—and you are all these things not only to yourself but to any number of other people, including neighbors, colleagues, friends, marketers, and National Security Agency contractors, to name just a few.

 When phrased thus, yes, it certainly would have been nothing but science fiction back then.  Back then as in a mere 26 years ago.  How crazy is that!  How scary is that!

How all this sharing adds up, in dollars, is incalculable because the social Web is very much alive, and we keep supplying more and more personal information and each bit compounds the others.

 Not only are supplying the data, others are also providing the data.  It is important to keep in mind that:

Data—especially personal data of the kind shared on Facebook and the kind sold by the state of Florida, harvested from its Department of Motor Vehicles records, and the kind generated by online retailers and credit card companies—is sometimes referred to as “the new oil,” not because its value derives from extraction, which it does, but because it promises to be both lucrative and economically transformative.
In a report issued in 2011, the World Economic Forum called for personal data to be considered “a new asset class,” declaring that it is “a new type of raw material that’s on par with capital and labour.” 

So, how much is this new raw material worth?  You see that reflected, for instance, in the market valuation of Facebook at more than 80 billion dollars--from the more than 800 million users there.  As the quantity and quality of this raw material increases, the value of Facebook will also increase--ironically, we the people make the company worth that much by providing the data voluntarily!  Facebook is merely one example.  Google, Amazon, the NSA, ...

while we were having fun, we happily and willingly helped to create the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, a web whose strings give governments and businesses countless threads to pull, which makes us…puppets. The free flow of information over the Internet (except in places where that flow is blocked), which serves us well, may serve others better. Whether this distinction turns out to matter may be the one piece of information the Internet cannot deliver.

Not really what I imagined the world would be towards the end of 2013 back in 1987 when I was taken around the computing facilities at USC.  A mere 26 years ago that was!

Our roads are fast enough. Why is the internet connection slow?

Driving two thousand miles all the way to San Diego and back was a wonderful lesson on the role of infrastructure.

By infrastructure, I mean more than the interstate highway system for which we owe a lot to President Dwight Eisenhower's leadership. As efficient as driving on I-5 was, it was even more of a pleasure to take in the sights and experience the country along the complex web of state highways, and state and county roads.

This intricate network of roadways was, of course, not the first one in the country, when we refer to transport infrastructure.  The networks of railroads and canals had been developed even earlier.  The growth of railroads was remarkably correlated with the industrial revolution in the US, with the result that it is always tempting to ask economic historians whether the railroads led and triggered the American industrial revolution or whether the two simply went hand-in-hand.

Canals, railroads, and roads, along with air transport systems, are from centuries prior to this twenty-first century.  While in the contemporary world, we do transport goods and passengers by these different transport avenues, there is an important difference: our economic activities are not tied to manufacturing, which dominated the American economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Of course, a great deal of manufacturing happens even now in the US.  But, manufacturing is not the economic prime-mover as it was when Eisenhower led the charge to construct the interstate highway system. Now, almost eighty percent of our incomes and jobs are through the remarkably varied services sector.  The manner in which some of these can be bought and sold doesn't always require us consumers to travel by roads or planes, and instead our participation in the economy in increasingly electronic.  Streaming movies on Netflix means we do not have to head to theaters and video-rental stores.  Purchasing jeans at the Amazon website eliminates the need to drive to the nearest mall.  But, the infrastructure required to facilitate the rapidly growing cyber-economic activities do not seem to be the best in the world, unlike how the road systems complemented the previous economic landscape.

When it comes to the information superhighways, the US does not seem to have the numbers that will wow the rest of the world.  A recent report pegs the US with a number twelve ranking in a global comparison of average broadband speeds.  At an average speed of 6.7megabits-per-second (Mbps,) the US considerably lags behind the chart topper, South Korea, where internet connectivity speeds averaged at 15.7 Mbps.

This lagging behind in the twenty-first century highways ought to concern us in the country that created the internet in the first place. 

Instead, we are obsessed with winning the old-school infrastructure race; an example is this one, which asks:

"When will Americans realize we're losing the infrastructure race to China?"

Ahem, we are not losing any race, especially when it comes to roads and bridges.

Speaking of bridges and losing to China,

Oh, man, China’s infrastructure! President Barack Obama has praised China’s infrastructure investments and has frequently argued that we’ve got to follow in their footsteps.
Cue the sad trombones (via BBC):

A section of a multi-million dollar bridge in China that opened in November has collapsed, leaving three people dead and five injured, state media say.
Four lorries fell off the Yangmingtan Bridge in Harbin City, Heilongjiang province, when part of it collapsed, Xinhua news agency said.
Shoddy construction and over-loading have been blamed for the incident, it added.

This is the sixth major bridge collapse in China in a year. We can only hope the firms who built these bridges aren't the same Chinese firms that have been contracted to build bridges here in America.

I will mention it for the umpteenth time in this blog: China or India is not our competition!

Image of the day: Wikipedia Blackout

Wikipedia's statement here

CNN explains (?) the two

Here's how Google explains SOPA/PIPA

Has Zuckerberg figured out ideas on how to monetize this, too? :)

Trapped in political bubbles: my bubble can kick your bubble's butt :(

Three years, yes, exactly three years ago, in responding to an essay, I blogged:

we will not see any "uniter" anymore. Bush couldn't do it. Obama says he will, but I doubt it.

Why?  Not because of politics, but more so because of the phenomenal growth in information technology and the internet:

the political system in the US is not compatible with the multiplication of factions we see, more so thanks to the internet. On the other hand, such divisions will work well with parliamentary systems that have a gazillion political parties, and with proportional representation.

So, that was three years ago.  Twitter and Facebook were in their infancy then.  Where are we after three years?  While reviewing The Filter Bubble, Henry Farrell writes: (ht)

We are beginning to live in what Pariser calls “filter bubbles,” personalized micro-universes of information that overemphasize what we want to hear and filter out what we don’t. Not only are we unaware of the information that is filtered out, but we are unaware that we are unaware. Our personal economies of information seem complete despite their deficiencies. Personal decisions contribute to this pattern, and ever more sophisticated technologies add to it. Google’s understanding of our tastes and interests is still a crude one, but it shapes the information that we find via Google searches. And because the information we are exposed to perpetually reshapes our interests, we can become trapped in feedback loops: Google’s perception of what we want to read shapes the information we receive, which in turn affects our interests and browsing behavior, providing Google with new information. The result, Pariser suggests, may be “a static ever-narrowing version of yourself.”

I was worried about our own echo chambers even before this technological explosion, and I am hyper-worried now.  Back in graduate school, one term I was simultaneously registered in a course on international development in the economics department, and another in international relations.  Timur Kuran offered the conventional economic analysis, and Thomas Biersteker seemed like he was speaking an entirely different language.  My economics classmates, most of them from India and other developing countries, hadn't taken anything with Biersteker.  How could it be, I wondered.

And worried.

Worried because if that was how doctoral students took to scholarship and understanding of the world, and they wanted to devote their lives to this cause, then what about the rest of the vast majority who have real work to do and can't allocate the time and energy to listen to competing, alternative explanations?

Now, of course, everyday life is about most people, including faculty like my colleagues who are religious about their ideological beliefs, aligning themselves with certain points of view, subscribing to news outlets that reinforce their perspectives and thus, completely shutting ourselves from the rest.  The internet facilitates this filtering with more and more sophistication every single day.

This cannot be good for governing ourselves, when politics is nothing but a reconciliation of multiple perspectives.

This self-reinforcement may have unhappy consequences for politics. Pariser, who is inspired by the philosophy of John Dewey, argues that ideological opponents need to agree on facts and understand each other’s point of view if democracy is to work well. Exposure to the other side allows for the creation of a healthy “public” that can organize around important public issues. Traditional media, in which editors choose stories they believe to be of public interest, have done this job better than do trivia-obsessed new media. Furthermore, intellectual cocooning may stifle creativity, which is spurred by the collision of different ways of thinking about the world. If we are not regularly confronted with surprising facts and points of view, we are less likely to come up with innovative solutions.

Such a "collision" might sound a tad Hegelian with a synthesis arising out of thesis/anti-thesis, and this synthesis being challenged again by another anti-thesis, ad infinitum.  But, hey, isn't science as in "knowledge" a constant process of challenging conventional wisdom?

Now, re-read that quote from my three-year old post:

The Web doesn't bridge divisions; it multiplies and sharpens them. It doesn't build consensus or national coalitions; it grows factions. Truth be told, the Web doesn't network people at all--it lets them network themselves, which is quite different. The Web is the place where people can roll their own, and given that freedom, people tend to coalesce in relatively small, insular groups.
The real genius of the Web, in short, is that it lets people disconnect.

Tell me why this ain't so!

Post 9/11, it does appear that we have retreated en masse into echo chambers of our own.  George Packer writes in the New Yorker that:

The political division of America into red and blue hardened into the mutually hostile and unintelligible universes in which we live today. Bush, already viewed as illegitimate by many Democrats, became one of the most hated Presidents in American history; the writer Nicholson Baker even published a novella about the merits of assassinating him. Meanwhile, the Republican Party fell completely under the control of its most extreme elements, and “traitor” became a routine term for its opponents. For all the talk of national unity and a new sense of purpose, the terror attacks did nothing to bring together the country. America after September 11th was like a couch potato who survives a heart attack, vows to start a strict regimen of diet and exercise, and after a few weeks still finds himself camped out in the living room.

Farrell is optimistic though:

Information bubbles are hardly new, even though they now take new forms. In many societies, political parties long created information bubbles. Nineteenth-century America had partisan newspapers. In many 20th-century European countries, Social Democrats read Social Democratic newspapers, went to Social Democratic social clubs, joined Social Democratic trade unions, married other Social Democrats, and had Social Democratic babies. Christian Democrats and Communists had their own separate worlds. Nonetheless, democracy somehow kept working. As Harvard political theorist Nancy Rosenblum has argued, partisanship creates its own checks and balances. As long as partisans are contending for a majority of public support, they have to temper their own beliefs in ways that will allow them to appeal to the public and to respond to potentially persuasive arguments from their opponents. This is far from perfect (the public has its own problems). Nonetheless, as John Stuart Mill argued, it can sometimes bring us closer to the truth.

Democratic competition is not a complete solution. It does not protect individuals from a narrowing of their horizons. It would be a good thing if Google and Facebook deliberately injected “inefficient” connections into online social networks and search results to encourage people to follow new paths, but it’s not likely to happen. Even so, democracies are far more robust against information bubbles than Pariser believes. After all, they’ve survived bubbles for hundreds of years.

Here is to hope :)

The compartmentalized and polarized worlds in which we live

When I was new to this country, C-Span fascinated me for its uniqueness—it provided politics in the raw without filters of any kind, and offered me multiple perspectives that I could not have ever otherwise followed.  It even seemed rather quaint that the channel would list separate phone numbers for Republican and Democratic viewers to call in with their comments and questions.

Whether it was from C-Span or from other sources, the old days at least held out a possibility of conversations across political or religious lines and about the issues of the day, both profound and trivial. 

However, just as the common water cooler has been replaced by individualized water bottles, news sources and discussion forums have also become customized.  Thus, it is now easy to remain within our own narrowly defined identities, whatever they might be and, thereby, shut ourselves from anything that does not correspond to our views of the world.

Professor Cass Sunstein wrote about this rapidly emerging trend back in 2001—eons ago in the modern digital timelines!  Sunstein, currently the Director of the office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote then that one of the vices of the exponentially expanding modern communications involved “the risk of fragmentation, as the increased power of individual choice allows people to sort themselves into innumerable homogeneous groups, which often results in amplifying their preexisting views.”

Empirical evidence confirms this.  In a recent research paper, Shanto Iyengar of Stanford and Kyu Hahn of UCLA note that “although an infinite variety of information is available, individuals may well limit their exposure to news or sources that they expect to find agreeable. Over time, this behavior is likely to become habituated so that users turn to their preferred sources automatically no matter what the subject matter.”

Therefore, if at all, I am surprised that it has taken this long to loudly recognize that modern communication technologies that feed us with more news than we could possibly digest, have also made it remarkably easy for us to choose our own filters. 

Fragmentation in the news media will then be a logical outcome in such an information world.  As a matter of fact, this is already the case in the part of India that I visited last summer, and there does not appear to be a great deal of concern over it either.

In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the two main political parties are represented through their leaders Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi.  Interestingly enough, they both also own stakes in two television cable channels.  The channel “JayaTV” is aligned with Jayalalitha, while “SunTV” is pro-Karunanidhi.  These channels offer the usual entertainment staples of dramas and movies.  But, it is during the regional news programs that their political slant becomes obvious.  Because Karunanidhi is in power now, JayaTV is forever critical of the government, and the roles reverse when the political fortunes shift!

It was equally fascinating that the audience is also fully aware that the news from these two television channels is not unbiased.  Thus, news items that are highly critical or laudatory are then appropriately scaled by the viewers!

Perhaps then all we need in America is a similar sort of full-disclosure of political affiliations from “news” organizations in America. 

Now, as Sunstein argued eight years ago, such fragmentation might not advance the cause of healthy democratic participation.  Instead of having constructive conversations where differences are articulated, we then end up with “shoutfests” where the objective is not to listen to differing views but to drown out the opposing voices. 

But then, as the old saying goes, the genie is, unfortunately, out of the bottle!  We have no choice but to get used to the reality that, thanks to technological wonders, most Americans—and the rest of the world, too—will increasingly live in polarized and fragmented political worlds.

If only Faux Noose would add a permanent full-disclosure of sorts, then it can easily preclude the kind of satire it provokes and receives from the Daily Show :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Parent Company Trap
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

and then follow it up with Colbert

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Terror Bunker 5200
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

The Web is dead? And Flipboard?

Because of an NPR report, and then the Charlie Rose program, I checked out this piece at Wired--on how the web is dead.  A catchy and provocative title, yes.  The essay makes a distinction between the "www" and the "internet."

And, thankfully, I am able to follow this discussion! 

Decades ago, when I was transitioning into graduate school life, I took up a job with the computing services (UCS) at USC.  This was in addition to my graduate assistantship.  My first day at UCS, the supervisor took me around to the backrooms and pointed to a bunch of stuff and said something like, "this is our ARPAnet."  Having been trained in the Indian culture, I didn't ask him what that meant ... annoying people with questions is something I became good at much later, and I have to thank America for it :)

But, it did not take me long to understand that ARPANET was one awesome computer network.  I recall spending hours reading random and useless posts on various "soc." and "alt." groups.  Some were profound too--in fact, it was from one of those soc.culture.indian postings that I knew that the then dictator president of Pakistan, Zia ul Haq, died in a plane crash.  These were the days of the "internet" before the World Wide Web--the web now.

Which brings us to the death of the web as Wired argues:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.

(and to think that higher education still wants to hang on to the old lecture/chalkboard mode of teaching/learning!!!)

So, where is the trigger coming from?

The rise of machine-to-machine communications — iPhone apps talking to Twitter APIs — is all about control. Every API comes with terms of service, and Twitter, Amazon.com, Google, or any other company can control the use as they will. 

Kind of creepy, come to think of it: machine-to-machine communications?  Hey, buddy, isn't communication supposed to be between and amongst humans? :)
Ok, I am exaggerating. But, not by that much.
The following video is an example of how much the machine-to-machine communications can present a completely different kind of experience for us humans ...

Cue that Twilight Zone music already :)

Guam tips over, and McCain is not a maverick ...

I think there is something in the water that many politicians are drinking these days.  It is old news that  the internet was described as a series of tubes, or that science itself is routinely debunked.  Now, they are on the social sciences too; Gail Collins summarizes some of the recent developments when she writes:

It’s been a tough time lately for those of us who take social studies seriously.

Examples?

The governor of Virginia has decided to bring slavery into his overview of the history of the Confederacy. Good news, or is this setting the bar a wee bit too low?
...
History took a hit in Texas, where the state Board of Education tried to demote Thomas Jefferson, presumably because of his enthusiasm for separation of church and state. This week, John McCain rewrote his own political biography, telling Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.” And on the geography front, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia took time during a recent Congressional hearing to express his concern that stationing additional Marines on Guam would make the island “so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

If you remotely thought that the Guam tipping over comment is an exaggeration, well, it is not.  Watch this absolutely surreal pontification by Johnson and, if you are like me, you will wonder how the admiral kept a straight face!

Internet and creativity

I am not sold on the idea that somehow the growth of the internet impedes creativity.  Often I think it is the other way around .... and here is an example of how creative people can get and, more importantly, how easily that product can be shared with the entire world:

Source

Net neutrality?

Joe "You lie" Wilson opposes it.  That can mean only one thing: we need net neutrality ASAP :-)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
From Here to Neutrality
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Bored with the internet :-)

Will governments in the 21st century be only nightmares?

The Web doesn't bridge divisions; it multiplies and sharpens them. It doesn't build consensus or national coalitions; it grows factions. Truth be told, the Web doesn't network people at all--it lets them network themselves, which is quite different. The Web is the place where people can roll their own, and given that freedom, people tend to coalesce in relatively small, insular groups.
The real genius of the Web, in short, is that it lets people disconnect.

I agree with the author here. There is a good chance that people from the left and right of the political spectrum will agree with the author--even though the observation comes from Peter Huber with the Manhattan Institute. So, here is the irony: Most people left of the political center would not even know about this observation because they don't bother to listen to anything from the Manhattan Institute. If The Nation were to make a valid observation, there is a good chance that the people from the right would not have heard it at all. (All these are restatements of the old philosophical question, if a tree falls in a forest ....)

If Huber is on the right track, and I think he is, then we will not see any "uniter" anymore. Bush couldn't do it. Obama says he will, but I doubt it.

I suppose the political system in the US is not compatible with the multiplication of factions we see, more so thanks to the internet. On the other hand, such divisions will work well with parliamentary systems that have a gazillion political parties, and with proportional representation.

In any case, we are then looking at governments that won't be able to push any big agenda items. Which also means that we might never be able to undo any of the irresponsible policies from the past--we will be stuck with them forever.

21st century government seems to be more of a nightmare.
Thanks to Peter Gordon for the link to Huber's commentary.