Geek Power

Crossposted from the HPRgument

Here’s Bill Gates from a Wired magazine interview about the state of computer hacking:

If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naivete that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.”

And apparently Gates isn’t kidding around. From the New York Times:

Now Dr. Venter is turning from reading the genetic code to an even more audacious goal: writing it. At Synthetic Genomics, he wants to create living creatures — bacteria, algae or even plants — that are designed from the DNA up to carry out industrial tasks and displace the fuels and chemicals that are now made from fossil fuels.

“Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.”

On an only-slightly-related note, I have this whole rant about how internet technology production has become sufficiently easy, so that new test of ambitious product development is not whether your technology performs a neat function — or even, whether it turns a profit — but rather, whether it helps do something materially important for the world. That that the new standard is “meaningful stuff that matters.” Websites are easy. Changing the world is hard. And sorry, but Foursquare and Farmville don’t cut it.

Silicon valley (so the rant goes) is rapidly becoming the pre-burst financial sector of the tech world: an industry predicated on the production of profitable, socially destructive crap. Thousands of the smartest people spend their time producing web gadgets designed to aggregate digital ephemera, while the world around them spins. Zuckerberg has spoken eloquently about a “more open world“; but what about a more meaningful one? Where it’s not openness for its own sake — open to learn about status updates and see old hook-ups’ photos — but openness in service of empowerment and progress.

The really ambitious web developers are the ones going out there and trying to fix American democracy or global warming or world poverty. It’s a brave new world we live in, where you have Bill Gates saying that if he were a kid he’d be “hacking biology,” not creating websites, and now he’s off setting up malaria nets in Africa.

Such the rant goes. But I’ll spare you that rant. Let’s all just revel in the awesomeness of these articles. And then get to work being the ambitious Harvard students or HPRgument readers that we are.

Online Privacy, Google and Facebook

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Google's court case in Italy is a big deal. As everyone is saying, if Google can be held accountable for the content it syndicates on its site, that would change the way that information flows through the internet forever. It could close the whole thing down.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to throw out some loosely connected ideas on the subject of Google, privacy rights, etc. Maybe some of them will stick:

First, this case seems to be less about principled differences between Continental and American conceptions of privacy, and more about Berlusconi's media holdings. Italy has a pretty screwed up media environment; and its internet usage is among the lowest in Europe.

Second, more generally, I'm not really bullish on privacy rights mostly because I don't know exactly what that term means. As a lay person (not a lawyer), it's always struck me that most "privacy violations" are actually just other legal violations in disguise -- that posting a video of an autistic teenager being bulllied is actually an issue of harassment, libel and property theft, not "privacy" itself. Is it possible to understand privacy without these other constituent ideas? And if not, then how can we even try to create a coherent online privacy regime?

And further, as someone who thinks that American community is worth caring about, I'm struck that the problem of our country is not that we have too little privacy but that we demand too much. It's clear that in America at least our lives are more private than they ever were before -- our music is listened to privately, we commute in private vehicles, and the notion of a neighborhood, where people know each others' names and keep up on their lives, has all but vanished. Our private lives are very big -- filled with cell phones, iPods, laptops, etc -- and our public lives are increasingly small.

Third, the problem with data sharing on the internet to me is not that anyone can see the information I post (I can clearly, if imperfectly, decide these days what information I release and to whom); the problem is that the information never goes away. On Facebook -- unlike in real life -- everything sticks, nothing vanishes, my past is there forever. It's been said that the greatest feature of the human brain is its ability to forget. Otherwise, how could we deal with all the of data points of daily life? How could we create meaning or priorities? The under-discussed problem with the internet, to me, is not privacy, but total, unforgiving memory.

Fourth, given all of the above, it is true that Google/Facebook does do a lot of creep shit with our data, and we would be well served to be wary of that. Every college student should check out this interview with an anonymous (oh the irony!) Facebook employee. "Q: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?/ A: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are?"

Good question! Excerpts from the interview beneath the fold...

Photo attribution: Flickr stream of Aboca