Closer To The Ideal

A very odd 1st Amendment case. The creepiest thing about this case is that the district attorney invented a “five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like ‘what it means to be a girl in today’s society‘”. I do not want to live in a society where district attorney’s have the discretion to invent their own re-education programs. Such programs need to be invented by the legislature, not the executive or judicial branch.

On January 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit heard arguments in Miller, et al. v. Skumanick, a child pornography case that, oddly, involves no child pornography. The case goes back to 2006, when two girls aged 12 were photographed by another friend on her digital camera. The two girls were depicted from the waist up, wearing bras. In a separate situation, our third client was photographed as she emerged from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her waist and the upper body exposed. Neither of the photos depicted genitalia or any sexual activity or context. In 2008 the girls’ school district learned that these and other photos were circulating, confiscated several students’ cell phones, and turned the photos in question over to the Wyoming County district attorney, George Skumanick, Jr.

Skumanick sent a letter to the girls and their parents, offering an ultimatum. They could attend a five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and “non-traditional societal and job roles.” They would also be placed on probation, subjected to random drug testing, and required to write essays explaining how their actions were wrong. If the girls refused the program, the letter explained, the girls would be charged with felony child pornography, a charge that carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.

A single, individual district attorney may have standards that diverge from that of the majority. The legislature is more likely to take into account the full balance of concerns that need to be addressed, from majority norms to the civil rights of those in minority. While miscarriages of justice can arise from any branch of government, they are more likely when a single individual government agent assumes they have the power to make up new programs unilaterally. In this case, it is clear the district attorney has views that violate both due process and also the norms that are probably held by reasonable people:

Interestingly, none of the classmates who distributed the photos received letters from Skumanick. Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges. If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, “high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves.”

Ultimately, that’s what this case comes down to: one man’s view on how a young woman should conduct herself. The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education. Instead the girls are threatened with felony charges and life-long registration as sex offenders. To apply such a penalty, designed to protect minors against exploitation, is a grotesque misapplication — and that’s once again assuming that the photographs in question could possibly be construed as pornographic. In reality, there was no way such charges would ever stick, and the DA’s office had to know this. The child porn charges were merely a threat, to force the parents to subject their children to Skumanick’s moral view of the world, where any and all child nudity is illegal and bras and bikinis are pornographic.

Whether we are talking about the evolution of finches  in the Galápagos Islands  or the evolution of the software projects that we work on, my sense is that diversity offers its greatest benefit during  a crisis. The worst thing about monoculture is the powerful reward it offers to pathogens. Or, as Wikipedia says:

The dependence on monoculture crops can lead to large scale failures when the single genetic variant or cultivar becomes susceptible to a pathogen or when a change in weather patterns occur.

Extending that as a metaphor for business, groupthink (a monoculture of thought) can lead to catastrophic failure when some foundational assumption of the group is proven wrong. A monoculture of thought offers a powerful reward to pathogenic behavior. Consider the meltdown at Enron, where top executives all agreed on the profitability of reckless energy trades, and they continued to agree with each other almost till the very moment company declared bankruptcy. Likewise, the top executives at AIG were certain that they had distributed risk in a such a way that the downside of that risk would never catch up with them. – people with dissident viewpoints were squeezed out of their jobs. Or consider the 40 year decline of the United States auto industry, an industry that has suffered more than most from groupthink and inaccurate assumptions. The executives of the 1970s and 1980s felt, despite the gathering evidence, that price was more important to Americans than quality, and that quality automatically meant expensive, and so they lost a generation of car buyers.

A corporate culture that values homogeneity is at grave risk of punishing non-conformists. A good manager is always on guard against the kinds of social bullying, however subtle, that can cause people to censor their opinions. This is a basic task of risk management: reduce risk by challenging core assumptions. Make sure divergent view points are heard.

I should add, if you are working at a new start-up, struggling to find its place in the world, you should treat every day as a crisis.

Genetic diversity allows a population multiple avenues to move forward when a radical change in the external environment dooms the existing species, in their current forms. Genetic diversity helps facilitate the transformation of sub-sections of those populations to evolve into new forms. Likewise, when a corporation faces a crisis, having a diverse range of opinions is healthy, and the more those differences of opinions reach down to core assumptions, the healthier. In boom times, such diversity of opinion could potentially be viewed as annoyingly disruptive of the good times, but in a crisis, what’s needed is the maximum of diversity: in viewpoint, in history, in current circumstances, in goals, in future expectations, etc.

In theory, a genius of a manager could possibly assemble a team made up solely of white males, which still had enough diversity of opinion to perform well in a crisis, but as a practical matter, the most reliable way to put together a diverse team is to recruit people from different backgrounds, different genders, different races and, where possible, different countries.

I regard the cultivation of diversity on a project as a fundamental survival technique, so I devote a lot of time to recruiting newcomers to the field of programming. And so, I read with interest Kirrily Robert’s discussion of recruiting women to work on an open source project (what follows is from Robert’s blog post):

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I surveyed women on the Dreamwidth and AO3 projects and asked them about their experiences. You can read a fuller report of their responses on my earlier blog post, Dispatches from the revolution.

One of the first things I asked them was whether they had previously been involved in open source projects. They gave answers like:

I’d never contributed to an open source project before, or even considered that I could.

I didn’t feel like I was wanted.

I never got the impression that outsiders were welcome.

I considered getting involved in Debian, but the barriers to entry seemed high.

Those who got a little further along still found it hard to become productive on those projects:

It’s kind of like being handed a box full of random bicycle parts: it doesn’t help when you don’t know how they go together and just want to learn how to ride a bike.

People without a ton of experience get shunted off to side areas like docs and support, and those areas end up as the ladies’ auxiliary.

But on Dreamwidth and AO3…

What I like most is that there isn’t any attitude of “stand aside and leave the code to the grown-ups”. If there’s something that I’m able to contribute, however small, then the contribution is welcome.

And this one, which is my favourite:

Deep down, I had always assumed coding required this kind of special aptitude, something that I just didn’t have and never would. It lost its forbidding mystique when I learned that people I had assumed to be super-coders (surely born with keyboard attached!) had only started training a year ago. People without any prior experience! Women! Like me! Jesus! It’s like a barrier broke down in my mind.

So, what can we learn from this? Well, one thing I’ve learnt is that if anyone says, “Women just aren’t interested in technology” or “Women aren’t interested in open source,” it’s just not true. Women are interested, willing, able, and competent. They’re just not contributing to existing, dare I say “mainstream”, open source projects.

And this is great news! It’s great news for new projects. If you are starting up a new open source project, you have the opportunity to recruit these women.

Robert Hoekman is writing about the death of “Tyler”, a pit bull dog. I find it unusual, and uncomfortable, to see this much anger in a public forum:

We were all so confident that Rachel, his would-be new owner, was the right person for him. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Less than nine hours after leaving him in her care, she did the exact thing we explicitly told her not to do, the one thing that most blatantly defies common sense: she let him off of his leash. In less than nine hours, she took away everything we did, everything we hoped for, and every chance Tyler would ever have at living the life he deserved.

Tyler was depending on Rachel. We were depending on her. She failed at her commitment to love and support this wonderful, sweet, and loyal dog so miserably and so quickly that it has absolutely stunned each and every one of the amazing people that have volunteered their time and energy to bring Tyler home safely. Even worse, Rachel opted out of continuing to aid in the search, citing her outrageously absurd belief that Tyler would simply go back to doing what nature designed him to do best: be one with the Earth through his nomadic and migratory instincts.

People who never met Tyler, my wife, nor myself came to the area night after night, morning after morning. They hiked through the preserve. They walked neighborhoods. They posted flyers. They talked to everyone they came across. Every last one of them did so much more than Rachel could be bothered to do. Every one of them cared so much more than she ever could.

I wish more than words can say that last Saturday had never happened — that we had decided to keep Tyler ourselves and not brought him to his new owner’s apartment and said goodbye. I wish we had been able to see her naivete and arrogance before it was too late. I wish so many things were just slightly different than they were.

I will never forgive Rachel for her foolish and fatal decision. Tyler will never have the chance.

Even if “Rachel” is a fictional name, I assume that if I made an effort, I could find out this woman’s real name.

I’m curious if it is ever wise to express this much anger in a public setting? I’d be angry as hell if someone’s lack of responsibility lead to the death of an animal that I cared about, and I might even vent about the incident in public, but I don’t think I’d give enough details that other’s could figure out who I am talking about.

danah boyd on classroms, meeting, back channels and the generation gap:

My frustration at the anti-computer attitude goes beyond the generational gap of an academic conference. I’ve found that this same attitude tends to be present in many workplace environments. Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.

I have become a “bad student.” I can no longer wander an art museum without asking a bazillion questions that the docent doesn’t know or won’t answer or desperately wanting access to information that goes beyond what’s on the brochure (like did you know that Rafael died from having too much sex!?!?!). I can’t pay attention in a lecture without looking up relevant content. And, in my world, every meeting and talk is enhanced through a backchannel of communication.

This isn’t simply a generational issue. In some ways, it’s a matter of approach. Every Wednesday, MSR New England has a guest speaker (if you wanna be notified of the talks, drop me an email). None of my colleagues brings a laptop. I do. And occasionally my interns do (although they often feel like they’re misbehaving when they do so they often don’t… I’m more stubborn than they are). My colleagues interrupt the talk with questions. (One admits that he asks questions because he’s more interested in talking to the speaker than listening… he also asks questions to stay awake.) I find the interruptions to the speaker to be weirdly inappropriate. I much much prefer to ask questions to Twitter, Wikipedia, and IRC/IM. Let the speaker do her/his thing… let me talk with the audience who is present and those who are not but might have thoughtful feedback. When I’m inspired, I ask questions. When I’m not, I zone out, computer or not.

My colleagues aren’t that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren’t used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it’s utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging.

I’m 31 years old. I’ve been online since I was a teen. I’ve grown up with this medium and I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now and always.

danah boyd makes some good points about the legal proceedings against Lori Drew, in the case that grew out of Megan Meier’s suicide:

Bullying is a horrific practice, but it’s also a common response when people struggle to attain status. Backstabbing, rumor-mongering, and enticement aren’t unique to teenagers. Look in any corporate office or political campaign and you’ll see some pretty nasty bullying going on. The difference is that adults have upped the ante, learned how to manipulate and hide their tracks. In other words, adults are much better equipped to do dreadful damage in their bullying that children and teens. They have practice. And it’s not a good thing.

Lori Drew abused her power as a knowledgeable adult by leveraging her adult knowledge of psychology to humiliate and torment a teen girl. Put another way, Lori Drew engaged in psychological and emotional child abuse. Child abuse includes the psychological or emotional mistreatment of a child. Unfortunately, most legal statutes focus on sexual and physical abuse and neglect because emotional abuse is very hard to substantiate and prosecute. But realistically, she should’ve been tried with child abuse, not a computer crime.

The fact that technology was involved is of little matter. Sure, she couldn’t have said those things to Megan’s face, but she could’ve hired a boy to do so. (How many movies have been made of boys being roped into teen girls’ humiliation schemes?) The crime she should be convicted of should have nothing to do with technology. She should be tried (and convicted) of psychologically abusing a child.

Why do we focus on the technology? Is it because it is the thing that we don’t understand? Or is it because if we were actually forced to contend with the fact that Drew was abusing a minor to protect her own that we’d have to face our own bad habits in this regard? How many of you have done something problematic to protect your child? I suspect that, at the end of the day, many parents could step in Lori Drew’s shoes and imagine themselves getting carried away in an effort to protect their daughter from perceived injustices. Is that why we’re so centered on the technology?