[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Jon, 

 

Two things: 

 

I really LIKE what you are doing, here. 

 

..but.I don’t quite get it, yet.  I think it’s closely related to my take on the IOWA thing, which was that the phenomenon of interest was our out rage that the democratic process hadn’t been so rigged that we could have the results before we put out the dog and brung in the cat (or was it put out the cat, and brung in the dog; even when I had cats and dogs, I never knew which), and gave the babies one more tuck before we ourselves went to bed.  The funniest thing I ever heard was the 538 blog trying to use up the half hour they had booked with their audience.  Instead of saying, “Sorry, folks, we got nothing; go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep, for once,” they tried to turn the fact that they had nothing into a political event warranting their prescribed time slot.  I was almost as humiliating as when Rachel Maddow tried to turn a fragment of one of Trump’s tax returns into a 43 minute saga.  If ever there were a case of the media tail wagging the political dog, this would be it.  

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love these people.  Am addicted to them.  But it’s when your friends do stupid things that it REALLY hurts. 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Friday, February 7, 2020 12:55 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

 

My intention in drawing attention to critical application

development is an attempt to deepen the discussion

around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around

app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears

to be the vulnerability which exists today because

programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who

never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church

meeting passes without a discussion of the precision

engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

 

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame

are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_dispute>  encryption dispute

and the Target corp data breach <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.04940.pdf>  of 2013. In the first case,

the federal government is confronted by the reality that a

phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically

challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this

powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures

which arrive at their target destinations almost without

fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified

indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second

to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can

have nice things.

 

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system

of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,

a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing

here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that

Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we

speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable

we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

 

Jon

 

 

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