Only until they are personal

Crises are political only until they are personal. As news of Mr. Frilot’s diagnosis spread, among his friends and on Nola.com, his story was no longer just that of a young, healthy person who caught a virus that young, healthy people had been told they were not supposed to catch. It was a revelation for the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, where many had written off the pandemic as liberal fear-mongering. Mr. Frilot, a registered Republican, and his family are generally apolitical, and were not thinking much about the virus — whether as a fiction or anything else — before he got sick.
covid-infection-story.jpg
On Facebook, Kathy Perilloux shared a similar conversion. Before March 16, Ms. Perilloux’s page was almost solely posts questioning the severity of the virus. March 10: “Hurricane Corona …. HYPE …. sigh,” she wrote. (“I stole that from Rush, but I was thinking the same before he said it!!!!!” she added in a comment.)

Then Ms. Perilloux commented on Ms. Frilot’s post: “Your story puts a real face on a real danger, that’s what had been missing.” She hasn’t posted anything else about the pandemic.

Since Friday, March 13, Mark Frilot has managed just two breaths on his own.
Her Facebook Friends Asked if Anyone Was Actually Sick. She Had an Answer, by Elaina Plott, New York Times, 19 March 2020

More Gibson than Gibson

“Welcome to 2020, time travelers, where white grandads fighting for racial equity mid pandemic are equipped with n95s and super charged leaf blowers to ‘blow the tear gas away.’”
— Jacqueline Alemany @JaxAlemany, 24 July 2020, in response to Sergio Olmos' video of Portland protestor Peter Buck. With "Gibson" I'm referring to the work of cyberpunk/speculative fiction author William Gibson.

Imagine a world in which

We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.

All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.
We’re not going back to normal, by Gideon Lichfield, Technology Review, 17 March 2020. With light edits.

In small places, close to home

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
Eleanor Roosevelt, from her remarks known as "The Great Question", delivered at the United Nations in New York on March 27, 1958.

This quote was a little hard to track down, but I found this in Kathryn Kish Sklar’s essay in Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights: "Roosevelt's remarks were extemporaneous and no document of them survives… [She] was speaking at the UN on the occasion of presenting a pamphlet co-authored with Ethel Philips, In Your Hands: a Guide for Community Action (New York: Church Peace Union, 1958).”

Cultural Engagement to Mitigate Social Isolation

My collaborator Dana Mitroff Silvers and I have received a grant from the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, to help museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations work more directly with their communities during this awful, challenging moment in America.

The Aspen Tech Policy Hub announcement and press release is here.

10 cultural organizations, together serving over 4 million people across the United States, have joined us.

Our partners are,

The idea of this project is very humble and straightforward: Dana and I will bring the group together and provide workshops, facilitation, coaching, know-how, and outside perspectives; and the participants will bring their vast professional expertise, imagination, and intimate knowledge of their communities, missions, and values. We’ll meet weekly over the course of 10 weeks and together we’ll try to nudge new experiments and ideas into the light of day.

When we conceived this project back in April we were focused exclusively on addressing the harm being caused to communities and individuals by the social isolation of Covid-19, but April seems like it was 100 years ago. Now, with our hearts aching from the eruption of pain, fear, and anger of what we have all lived through and witnessed over the last few days here in the US, and with many of our collaborators dealing with the immediate consequences and long-term root causes of violence and injustice on their own doorsteps, we will inevitably be drawn together towards a larger and more consequential response.

I hope you will follow this project here, with the participants directly, on my Twitter and Dana’s Twitter — and I also hope that everyone, everywhere, will become more deeply committed to the social and cultural life, social justice, and wellbeing of their own communities.

P.S.

In addition to this Aspen project I’m also beginning to lead a series of sense-making workshops with Europeana Network members this week, with Jasper Visser, to help understand and support the digital transformation they are currently experiencing across the European cultural sector.

Also, we have launched a call for participation for What Matters Now, an online community event to be held on July 10, 2020 [was previously July 3]. Please check it out and join us!

“The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function”
https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1263661094024994818

https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1263661094024994818

This “extinction of the human race” statement is often attributed to Edward Teller but I can't find a reference to a specific time or place he said or wrote it. The closest I can find is the statement “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function,” by a Manhattan Project colleague of Mr. Teller, physicist Albert Allen Bartlett. See Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101 from Bartlett's website.

“When we balance out what’s more important, speed or accuracy, it’s not even a close call. We should be expecting accuracy and adjusting our expectations in regards to speed.”
— David Becker, Executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, in Iowa’s Lesson: Political Parties Are Not as Good as Government Officials at Counting Votes, by Jessica Huseman, Jack Gillum and Derek Willis, 4 February 2020

20-cents off a can of corn

Most large companies doing business in California are required by the state’s new privacy law to disclose what they know about customers and how that information is used.

This resulted in fairly straightforward announcements by many businesses.

Then there’s Ralphs, the supermarket chain owned by Kroger.

…As part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs “may collect” information such as “your level of education, type of employment, information about your health and information about insurance coverage you might carry.”

It says Ralphs may pry into “financial and payment information like your bank account, credit and debit card numbers, and your credit history.” […]

Ralphs says it’s gathering “behavioral information” such as “your purchase and transaction histories” and “geolocation data,” which could mean the specific Ralphs aisles you browse or could mean the places you go when not shopping for groceries, thanks to the tracking capability of your smartphone.

Ralphs also reserves the right to go after “information about what you do online” and says it will make “inferences” about your interests “based on analysis of other information we have collected.”

Other information? This can include files from “consumer research firms” — read: professional data brokers — and “public databases,” such as property records and bankruptcy filings.

[The article also notes that Ralphs' parent company Kroger also owns a company 'devoted solely to using customer data as a business resource' by aggregating data about its customers and selling it on the open market.]

“This level of intrusiveness seems like a very unfair bargain in return for, say, 20 cents off a can of corn,” Fordham’s Reidenberg said.

Is a supermarket discount coupon worth giving away your privacy?, by David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2020
“Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century polities is bereft of grand visions.”
— Homo Deus, by Yavul Harari, 2015. Page 372

Meaningful Visions of the Future

“In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on polities. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies — and our bodies and minds too — but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic polities is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future.”
Homo Deus, by Yavul Harari, 2015. Page 372

Looking for GLAM orgs for a grant project on social distancing

UPDATE: This project is now funded! We’re looking for a couple of public libraries and performing arts organizations to round out the group. —Mike, 1 May 2020

A grant proposal I’ve developed with Dana Mitroff Silvers is a finalist to receive a small amount of funding to catalyze the creation of new GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) projects that mitigate the effects of social distancing caused by the Covid-19 crisis.

We’d like to gather a diverse set of 6-12 American GLAMs to participate in the project. Basically, if we get this grant, we would be paying you to get expert design thinking, strategy, and creative-development support.

So if you or someone you know is part of an adventurous, forward-looking American GLAM that is wanting to put some new Covid-related experiments out into the world, but could use some help, please give me a shout at https://usingata.com/contact ! (More info is here.)

Post Covid-19 strategy and response for culture, sign-up here

Last week I put up a post offering free strategy workshops to help people, organizations, and teams in the “cultural” & civil-society sectors deal with the Covid-19 crisis.

Based on the response, here’s some stuff you can sign up for, using the form at the bottom.

(Note: I’m hosting this on my own site for now, because that’s fast and easy for me, but we’ll find a more neutral place to host and collaborate as more organizers get involved.)

Strategy workshop

A lot of people said they wanted a workshop, so I’m working with 9 different teams now in the USA and Europe. I’m swamped, but let me know if you’d like to talk.

Peer-to-peer roundtable discussions

A lot of people said they wanted to be part of a peer-to-peer discussion. In response, Jasper Visser and I are organizing and hosting a leadership roundtable next week (hi Jasper, I didn’t take the time to check this text with you. I hope that’s ok) — and I’d like to help organize similar facilitated sessions for anyone in the cultural sector (with “culture” interpreted as broadly and generously as possible). This will need both participants (hah!) and facilitators.

Ignite talks (or some such thing)

And I got the sense, as I often do, that there’s a lot of great thinking and doing happening that’s hard for us to see or appreciate, given how chaotic things are. So I’d like to facilitate/host a virtual Ignite talk event (or some similar short talks format) to beckon forth people who what to share what they’re working on or going through. This will need both volunteers to help host and organize, and, of course, brave, big-hearted people who want to share what’s on their minds.

* * * * * * * * *

If any of these options/things interests you, please let me know via the form below.

Final thought: the priorities here are,

  • First, stay safe and take care of our families loved ones, and communities

  • Support each other

  • Figure out how to serve now, at a moment of great civic need

Sign up form

The sign-up period has closed but I’m keeping the form below for reference. Thanks! - Mike

This will send me an email and I’ll enter it in a spreadsheet. If you don’t like that we can find another way to talk. I won’t share your info with anyone unless you give me permission to do so.

Questions with a “*” at the end are required.

Enough doubt

“…Each day I believed a little more, and each day I still had enough doubt.”
Physicist Rana Adhikari, from an interview with Derek Muller, How Scientists Reacted to Gravitational Wave Detection, Veritasium2, 5 January 2017

This interview with Rana Adhikari, following his teams’ discovery of gravitational waves in 2016, is an astonishing testimony to the role of doubt in scientific inquiry.

DEREK MULLER: Can you tell me how you first realized that LIGO might have detected gravitational waves?

RANA ADHIKARI: I think I was traveling on that day so I didn't know. I came back here I believe on the day after and I was wandering around in the building and people were sort of whispering and looking over their shoulders but didn’t want to spill it. They were like did you hear, did you hear?  Have you seen it? What do you think? [And I said] I don't even know what your talking about. And they said yeah it's like “there’s an event and it looks really real.” And it’s like, whatever, I don't have time for this nonsense. I got things to do man.

MULLER: Why weren’t you more interested. This could be it, right?  You’ve been working for a decade, two decades?

ADHIKARI: Two decades.

MULLER: And you didn’t want to say like “I’ll have a look” at least?

ADHIKARI: No. We had just turned the detectors on, barely, I was ready to wait for some month or 6 months...I don’t know. We were going to take data for 3 or 4 months. And I thought maybe in a month or two something will pop but it'll be really tiny and we won't find it and then maybe we'll spend another six months combing through the data and developing the algorithms to eventually find it, but, you know, no way would it be like, you turn it on and immediately there’s a signal, which is what people were saying. 

So I said I said look, just settle down a little bit. You don't understand how the world works, it's not like this. You turn on your device and there's some burps and glitches and it's a kind of growing pains at the beginning. And I said, when you've been around as long as I have you understand how complicated it is, young people, so just go back about your business and nothing to see here. And that's all.

And then it just wouldn't die. Everyone was still looking at it. And I just didn't bother to look at it for another week, probably, because it just seemed, like... there's always fake events, right?

MULLER: But how did you finally convince yourself that it was real?

ADHIKARI: I downloaded the data and I looked at it, and I [made] a lot of plots. When I looked at it it just seemed like... there's no bells and whistles to it. It’s two black holes, and it’s spinning a lot, and they merge together and it swoops up in frequency and it chirps in just the right way and then what emerges is no craziness — it just emerges and goes “whoop.” And then  it settles down and the final black hole is not spinning. It just seems like something that...if you were trying to fake a signal, that seemed like a fine fake signal to make.

And the peak frequency of that signal…and there are a lot of astonishing things…the peak frequency of that signal happens to be at the frequency where our detector is most sensitive. What are the chances that nature would engineer a signal right in our sweet spot?

The easiest thing to calculate is black hole [to] black hole mergers because black holes are simple and don't have a lot of stuff inside of them, it’s just a black hole in space. And these two are about the same mass so the calculation of what the waveform should look like it's really simple, so it’s the easiest thing to find in so many ways. 

And I have always wanted to find a signal which is about this heavy because I thought, wouldn't it be great to find the black hole that was heavier than what everybody else wanted? And the signal would be really loud, and if the universe made black holes this heavy we could detect them way back in time to the beginning of the universe and we’d be able to see by looking at how these things got distorted as the universe expanded we could figure out a whole thing about how the universe expanded. This is just my dream.

I thought, fantastic! And then I see you signal like that … I said, uh, it's too good to be true. How could there be a signal that would be just like what I wanted, and as soon as we turned the thing on? That would mean that these black holes are so numerous that we're going to get these signals, you know, a hundred or a thousand times more frequently than we estimated, and how… that's not how the world works, right? It can't be everything is great. So I just didn't believe it. 

Then I went through and with a lot of other people we examined all of the different conspiracy theories that we had for how the signal could have been faked.

Like, someone was mad and tried to do it. Someone hacked in and changed the software. Someone went in and pushed something and had someone else on the phone at the other side and pushed something in the same way, and set up devices…

But you see what kind of mess it is here. If I had a little Gadget that made a little thing like that I could probably hide it underneath some place and cover it with some aluminum foil or trash. And so we had people walk around physically with a flashlight and look around everywhere to look for hidden conspiracy devices that would be sneakily putting in fake signals, because, you know, what if what if it got to the point where if we haven't had signals for so long, and someone who's really been waiting a long time and whose career depends on it…

MULLER: ...who needs their PhD or something…

ADHIKARI: Yeah, right, and their career will be made by something like this so they just get desperate and unethical and then they spend a year building a really maniacal plan to somehow do this and evade  everybody. And eventually we came to the conclusion that there was only maybe like five or six people left in our whole thousand person collaboration who had enough know-how to do all of these things, and so we all just stared at each other for a while and said, did you do it? Did you do it? And we couldn't come up with any way that it could have been done because you need at least two people to do it. One person alone wouldn’t be able to do it.

So I’d say by two or three weeks after the detection I was pretty well convinced that it was real.

MULLER: How did that feel?

ADHIKARI: It was like a slow boil. Nothing dramatic.

MULLER: You did go crazy and go to Vegas?

ADHIKARI: No because it didn't happen all at once. It was just each day I believed a little more. And each day I still had enough doubt.