There's a great article in the latest New Yorker about ownership. It starts off by relating the case of one William Merideth, who shot down a drone that hovered over his property while his daughter was sunbathing. It discusses all forms of ownership, starting with the idea that property owners also own the air above their property out to where the stars begin and down to the center of the Earth, an ancient legal principle called Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos. Eventually the discussion segues to the online world, where the article makes the case that we're all fast becoming "e-peons." We used the word peon as a put-down in high-school, so I'm familiar with it. It might also be familiar to you if you're a rapper—according to dailyrapfacts, "The slang term 'Peon' or 'Peons' are nouns and adjectives...used by rappers and in the music industry to reference a lame, low class or low status person (someone who is at the bottom of the food chain)."
"The digital and smart devices that surround us are legion, but we do not truly own or control them," writes Joshua A.T. Fairfield, in the book Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom. Having just spent a week wrangling with "my" computer, or rather Apple's computer that's in my house, and pondering again the headache of 3-2-1 backups, I really do wonder how much of what's on "my" computer and how it works is really under my control. Not as much as I like to think, I suspect. A number of years ago Apple sold the writing program I used, and the new owners (after several ownership changes) discontinued it, and before you knew it all those files that I had worked so hard on were un-openable. My work was lost. How that's conceptually different from someone breaking into my house and stealing stacks of paper on which I had written with india ink and a quill pen, I don't know.
I've always been against the idea of self-driving cars, because all I see is a future in which everyone will have to pay a monthly fee to participate in the program of whoever is supplying the guidance and coordinating system. I don't want to pay a monthly fee to drive. "If we do not take back our ownership rights," Fairfield writes in his newest book, Runaway Technology, we will only be able to use "our smart devices, our homes, our cars, and even our own software-enabled medical implants purely at the whim of others."
Are "my" digital pictures really mine? To what extent and to what degree can someone other than me control or limit my access to them? I don't know.
I also have a feeling I don't want to know....
Anyway, good reading. Check it out.
Mike
Book o' the Week:
ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)
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Featured Comments from:
Rob L (partial comment): "I haven't shot down a drone, but I may have practiced casting and hooked the drone hovering over my backyard trying to video the pool next door. Darn accidents, what can I say?(drone rotors and fishing line are not friends....)"
Christopher Crawford: "A peon is a person enslaved by debt. The term originated in Spain's colonies in the 1500s when the King, under pressure from the church, outlawed the enslavement of the natives in Mexico. Peonage replaced slavery. Technically the peon was not a slave, but they depended on a nobleman who rented farmland to them at prices higher than they could pay, forcing them to pay off the debt (which always got larger) with free labor. This system was called Peonage, and a Peon was a person enslaved by it. In some Spanish colonies, African slaves were imported; peonage was less common in those places than it was in places like Mexico where few black slaves were brought in."
Geoff Wittig: "I intermittently try to remember to save a copy of my favorite image files as a TIFF in hopes that I'll be able to open them down the road even if Adobe disappears and Photoshop is dead. Which might strike people as a ludicrous concern, until you think about what happened to Lotus. Back in the day they wrote the spreadsheet software the entire business world used, but then they were crushed by Microsoft and disappeared almost overnight. I suspect (don't know because I'm a spreadsheet illiterate) that countless businesses and financial people lost painstakingly written macros and custom spreadsheets when that happened. So it bothers me to think that I don't really 'own' my own multi-layered Photoshop image files because Adobe might some day just stop supporting them. Kinda like having thousands of slides and having the last bulb for the last slide projector burn out."
mike rosenlof: " I suspect you may get other comments like this, but I don't think it's a good analogy to compare writings lost inside no-longer-supported files formats to theft of paper from your house. I think it's a better comparison would be if you stored your files on eight-inch floppies and now you can't find a reader. For that matter, any floppies, SCSI disks, etc. Technology marches on and doesn't necessarily pull the old baggage with it. You have written about how to make sure one's photos survive. Option no. 1, 'Be famous' if I recall correctly. This is a recurring issue for any creations in the digital realm. Digitally stored material requires active maintenance to ensure the work makes it across generations of technology.
"I readily admit that I don't practice what I preach. I print many photos, but I have a lot of stuff I've written that exists only in digital form. I have good backups, but they're all on SATA spinning disk drives.... P.S. checkout Open Office Writer; it opens several file formats that are no longer current."
James Bullard: "Re The drone question: No, you may not shoot down drones and you don't own the airspace above your property all the way out to the stars. You are however entitled to a certain degree of privacy and drones should not be flown over private property for the purpose of invading your privacy. Legally, in the U.S., all the airspace is controlled by the FAA and drone pilots are obliged to follow FAA rules for flying drones."
Rip Smith: "The problem of technical obsolescence of data is a great argument for printing the best of your photographs and even written pieces."
Dave Sailer: "Not there yet, but some are working on it, like these three, in laptop space. MNT Reform: ...take a look under the hood, customize the documented electronics, and even repair it yourself if you like. The Reform laptop has no built-in surveillance technologies, cameras, or microphones.... Librem 14: The first 14" laptop designed to protect your digital life. Ultra-portable workstation laptop that was designed chip-by-chip, line-by-line, to respect your rights to privacy, security, and freedom. PINEBOOK: Pinebook is a lightweight, low-cost notebook designed and manufactured by the company Pine64...its appearance resembles the MacBook Air...The Pinebook is sold at-cost by pine64 as a community service."