Berkman Center

dispatches from 23 Everett and beyond

[berkmancenter]

Matthew Battles, metaLAB at Harvard, delivered a talk on "Bearing the Standard: Histories of Cooperative Innovation" at the Books in Browsers 2014 conference, about the importance of standards in the digital publishing age.

[berkmancenter]

Vivek Krishnamurthy: Aereo’s saga signals a chilling effect for innovation

Thursday’s announcement by Aereo that it will be shuttering its Boston office and laying off most of its staff is the inevitable consequence of an unfortunate Supreme Court decision that will chill disruptive innovation in stodgy industries like broadcasting for many years to come.

Aereo is, of course, the company that deployed a warehouse full of dime-sized antennas to stream over-the-air broadcasts to its customers’ Internet-connected devices. Unlike traditional cable TV systems, which use one big antenna to capture and distribute the same broadcast signals to every subscriber, each of Aereo’s tiny antennas enabled individual customers to watch a broadcast in real-time or record programs on Aereo’s cloud-based DVR service.

Read the full post at BetaBoston

[berkmancenter]

'For someone with an interest in privacy, there's certainly a lot about you online.' Someone once said that to me, and I laughed because I never said my research was about privacy. It’s a common assumption that because I’m writing about data and algorithms, I'm working on privacy. I often share personal details in my stories to get my point across — when Netflix thinks I have children, when fitness trackers don't match my personal fitness needs, or when Facebook asks me about my fiancé. I understand the cognitive dissonance that comes from sharing these details in an article when it seems the concern is about privacy. I rarely use the word in my work or in introducing myself, yet people still categorize the set of concerns I raise as falling under the umbrella term "privacy." As more of our lives are made legible as data and more of our experiences are processed by algorithms, I think privacy is an inexact term and doesn't fully encapsulate the range of our concerns. So if not "privacy," what could we call our concerns over data instead?

Fellow Sara Watson explores the "issue formerly known as privacy" in Al Jazeera America.

[berkmancenter]

Last night we celebrated the launch of Molly Sauter's new book, The Coming Swarm: DDoS, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. In it, Molly examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. Together in conversation with journalist and activist Laurie Penny, Molly discussed the use of disruptive tactics like DDoS, online civil disobedience, and the role of the internet as a zone of political activism and speech. You can order your copy of The Coming Swarm here.

[berkmancenter]

Emily Horne & Tim Maly on The Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance

In this Berkman talk, authors Emily Horne -- a creator of the webcomic A Softer World -- and Tim Maly -- writer and Fellow at Harvard’s metaLAB -- discuss their new book The Inspection House, and paint a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents. More info on this event here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/l...

[berkmancenter]

New paper by Primavera De Filippi explores the paradoxes of Open Data

Open Data is an important public policy that contributes to achieving greater transparency and broader access to information, more citizen participation and engagement, while also supporting innovation and economic growth. The pace at which the Open Data movement is spreading in different fields of endeavour can be taken as an illustration that society is evolving towards greater openness, transparency and accountability. Yet, several constraints and legal uncertainties subsist beyond the façade of Open Data. This article investigates different layers of rights that regulate the use and re-use of data: from the copyright vesting in the content and/or structure of a particular dataset, to the sui-generis right protecting against the substantial reproduction and/or extraction of the content of a database. The objective is, ultimately, to illustrate the conflictual relationship that subsists between the underlying principles of Open Data, which purports to promote the free use and re-use of information, and the underlying legal system, whose provisions are increasingly relied upon to establish an exclusive right on public sector information.

Read the paper

[berkmancenter]

Berkman Fellow Willow Brugh calls for action to understand and address "Weaponized Social"

The existing harms of social scripts we ran while in smaller, geographically-constrained groups are being amplified due to network effect. Tiny unchecked errors, scaled, become large harms as people find ways to exploit them, in life just as in software.

I propose we hold a 2-day event to understand “weaponized social” historically, tangentially, neurochemically, and technically — and to arrive at ongoing ways of addressing them. These challenges are not new, they are simply arising in space we consider new. Given the erosion of trust online, I see meeting in person as vital to rebuilding trust. You can suggest when and where the event takes place via http://goo.gl/forms/2iBJbHXD5E

There was a time when the hacker and academic circles I run in had the default assumption of “it’s better to have your idea broken by your friends than by someone else.” The implicit assumption being that we’d build even better ideas, together. I *hate* that loving dissent is disappearing from my corners of the internet, when I used to dream it would spread. I hate that there’s a vanishing chance I can reasonably assume a trolling comment online is social commentary from an yet-to-be-known compatriot dealing with the same bizarre issues of a system that I am; but rather must now deal with such as a potential precursor to having to leave my home based on legitimate death and rape threats. I hate that some of my intelligent male-shaped or nuero-atypical friends are scared to join conversations online for fear of being severely and permanently ostracized for slight missteps. I hate that some of my intelligent female-shaped friends feel unwelcome online – yes, because of “trolls” who often happen to be self-male-identified, but ALSO  because of an incredibly strange practice of women belittling each other. I hate that I only know how to speak to these issues in a gender-focused way, despite knowing damn well race and class come strongly into play, and having the sinking suspicion that cohorts don’t feel safe calling me out. I hate that nearly all my lovely friends of all genders feel unwanted and unsafe because they and others happen to be organisms interested in sex, and respond to culturally indoctrinated shame (in response as well as in self-assessment) by pinning problems on the tangible other, building self-fulfilling prophesies of distrust and violence. And I hate that we’re driving each other off pro-social paths, making taking an anti-social one more likely. I’m sick of these social scripts we’re auto-running, and I’m set on returning to lovingly breaking my friends’ ideas, and us examining and strengthening those ideas together. Please join me in this act for this event, the surrounding ideas, and the rest of life.

Read more at Willow's blog

[berkmancenter]

Sara Watson gave an Ignite talk Harvard-MIT Fellows meeting, hosted at Nieman’s Lippman House this Friday. We had fellows from Berkman, Nieman, Shorenstein, Institute of Politics, Weatherhead, Loeb, and Knight Science Journalism coming together to share their work. Sara’s talk touches on her work as a technology critic, work, her time far as a Berkman Fellow, and her i-beam text cursor tattoo. Her notes from the talk are here.

[berkmancenter]

The Festival of Ideas featured new fellows discussing their work, brainstorming about collaborating with algorithms and public discourse, thinking about the role the Berkman Center plays being at a university, and a little soccer for good measure. More photos in our Facebook album here.

[berkmancenter]

happy friday, interwebs

<3 berkman 

[berkmancenter]

This week we welcomed a whole new class of Fellows, Affiliates, Faculty, and even some new staff members to Berkman. It was a wild week, as you can tell from the mass selfie picture, and these Beastie Centaur Boys. More pictures in the Flickr album.

[berkmancenter]

Sara Watson blogged about her favorite moments as a fellow this year. It's a nice taste of the special things that go on at 23 Everett, including this gem from the fellows hour scavenger hunt.

[berkmancenter]