Microsoft has recently revealed that they will be releasing a new video game console, the Xbox One, later this year. One of the key features of the Xbox One is that comes with a new version of their Kinect camera (which has a microphone built in). The console/Kinect are capable of transmitting data over the Internet, and the console must connect to the Internet at least occasionally in order to operate. While Microsoft has said that the Kinect can be turned off (though it hasn’t specified how or to what degree), it does need to be physically plugged into the Xbox One in order for the console to operate. Regardless of whether or not the camera is turned on by the user, if the PC/laptop world is any indication, this won’t matter and the camera may be hackable even if the user has turned it off.
It was revealed earlier this evening that Microsoft (among a number of the world’s largest Internet companies) provides direct access to its services to the National Security Agency in order to spy on both Americans and foreign citizens. This includes the ability to access chat, video, voice, images, and a whole host of other information. That is to say, precisely the kind of information that the Kinect is designed to capture and transmit. This creates the suddenly very plausible scenario that the NSA or some other law enforcement agency in the U.S. could get direct access to a live video and audio feed of your living room (or wherever your Xbox One and TV are located) without you having any idea that it is doing so and with no resistance from Microsoft. (If you don’t think this kind of thing is plausible, you should read the Guardian article I linked earlier in this paragraph.)
This is, to put it mildly, extremely concerning.
By now you’ve probably heard about “Big Data”, the idea that by gathering massive amounts of information in computer databases and writing algorithms to sort through it we can gain objective insights into human behaviour and society in order to improve the way we function. There are plenty of problems with this framework (such as, for example, the fact that algorithms can only look for what humans tell them to and thus begin with significant built-in biases that make them anything but objective) but those are discussed in many places and they’re not really what I’m interested in looking at right now. I’ve read a couple of articles lately discussing some particular uses of “Big Data” that I think pose serious social and ethical challenges even if we could “fix” the algorithms to produce objectively correct information so that’s what I’m going to focus on.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about data surveillance and thinking about what it means for us as a society*. We’re very quickly approaching a point at which virtually everything we do is being watched and recorded by someone or something, both in public and what we have traditionally considered “private”. Almost everything that you do is being tracked or will probably be soon: what web sites you visit, how long it takes you to perform various tasks at work, how and where you drive your car, what options you choose in video game menus and how long you spend looking at them, your purchasing habits, and on and on. And while I think there is increasing awareness of this fact (at least I hope there is), I don’t think there’s an awful lot of clarity about why exactly we should care about this beyond ambiguous (though still important) concerns about “privacy”.
If you follow me on Twitter, and I’d guess that you do if you’re reading this, starting nearly two weeks ago you probably saw me peppering Bioshock Infinite with some pretty lavish praise. I described its environments as gorgeous, and they are; I described my experience of just wandering around the world looking at things, and I did. To be sure, this is one of the most beautiful games to just look at that I have ever played. But a game isn’t just a series of sprites or 3D models shoved together, it has other important elements like mechanics and story. And in those respects Bioshock Infinite does not hold up nearly as well. It’s a game that I very much enjoyed, but I enjoyed it despite some fairly serious (and somewhat numerous) flaws. [Note that the will be significant plot SPOILERS in this post, so if you don’t want the game spoiled, stop reading.]
About a week ago I posted a list of my top 5 video games of last year. This post is going to cover some top albums. It’s a lot easier to listen to a larger number of records than to play video games, so this list is going to be twice as large at 10. I’l try and describe in a paragraph or two why I like each album and link to a song on it that I hope you’ll enjoy. This’ll go in reverse order, starting at 10 and leading up to my favourite album of the year.
I’m going to run down a few of the games I most enjoyed this year. But before starting, I just want to list a few games that I haven’t played yet that I very much intend to. The omission of the following games from this list is one of time, not of quality – Need For Speed: Most Wanted, XCom: Enemy Unknown, Far Cry 3, Borderlands 2.
One thing I will say is that I found 2012 to be a pretty disappointing year for games. I’ve felt for a while now as though the AAA console side of the industry has been moving away from the kinds of games I find interesting. Almost everything is a shooter of some sort or other now. When I think about all the great games even one generation of consoles ago, even those that had guns featured them only tangentially (Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3 come to mind, Silent Hill 2 & 3 as well, etc.) The JRPG, my favourite genre, has all but dropped off the face of the Earth. The last good JRPGs I can think of, Lost Odyssey and Eternal Sonata, came out 5 years ago. And while I used to be a big fan of action-adventure games, there’s virtually nothing like Beyond Good & Evil being released anymore. Action-adventure games these days have too much action and not enough adventure. So I found 2012 to be a fairly unimpressive year for gaming, and I hope 2013 offers more.
But now, let’s dive into the best games of 2012.
I was reading David Frum’s endorsement of Mitt Romney today in which he sounds about as confident as Dostoevsky does when he’s arguing for the existence of God (not very). A number of things jumped out at me, but there’s one in particular that I want to focus on right now. Frum said:
The way to meet the climate change challenge is by taxing carbon emissions, not by government acting as venture capitalist to the green-energy industry. Fiscal stimulus was necessary in 2009. It’s not an excuse for unending government subsidy to particular industries and firms.
This is a common sentiment among conservatives, and I think it’s worth examing in a bit more detail. Frum he doesn’t want the government making investment decisions, presumably because he believes the market is better suited to finding efficient solutions than the government is. Most conservatives are in favour of high military spending, though (admittedly not libertarians, who may favour isolationism as a foreign policy). While progressives often call for cuts to military spending, believing it to be too high, I don’t think you’d find very many people except at the far left who don’t agree that the government does at least in general need to fund the military.
A significant portion of the funding for the military goes to paying salaries for the people who work in the military. But a lot of it also goes to the firms that manufacture the equipment and vehicles used by the military; that is to say that a large portion of the military budget is a subsidy to arms manufacturers. In its most insidious form this is known as the military-industrial complex, but even in a more basic form the point still holds – that the government subsidises military contractors. And no one really objects to this; while there are all sorts of things that people might wish to do to improve this process, virtually no one believes that on principle the government ought privatise the military and stop “picking winners and losers” in terms of military contractors. Why is this?
This past summer Google rolled out a new commenting policy that tried to convince Youtube users to post comments under their real names. The ostensible goal was to clean up the Youtube comment sections, which are known for being filled with useless bile. At the time I thought that it might be worthwhile to write a blog post explaining why I considered this policy to be a bad move. Like a lot of things I consider writing blog posts about thought, I wrote most of the post in my head but then got distracted by video games and never got around to writing it.
Then earlier this week Adrian Chen, writing at Gawker, revealed the offline identity of a man who he described as “the biggest troll on the web“. Doug Saunders of the Globe and Mail chimed in this morning saying that “The Gawker-Reddit thing really shows that anonymity serves no useful role in online communities.” He then went on to say that “The whole point about an online community is that it’s *public.* Anonymity fine for email, makes no sense in public.” So I figured maybe I should finally get around to writing that blog post about why anonymity on the Internet is a good thing.
A week ago Politico ran a story called Reporters: We loathe 2012 campaign. It was about how many people covering the Republican and Democratic bids for the White House are finding the campaigns to be boring to cover, lacking intrigue or interesting stories. Among their complaints were lines like the following:
“This is worse than normal, a lot less fun, and it feels impossible for us to change the conversation”
Or:
Reporters feel like both campaigns have decided to run out the clock with limited press avails, distractions, and negative attacks, rather than run confident campaigns with bold policy platforms or lofty notions of hope and change
And:
“The fact is, we are under-covering the economy, we are under-covering — but you cover the campaign that is in front of you”
Emphasis in those quotes added by me to highlight something I’m going to get to a bit later in this post, but keep that line of thought in mind as we proceed. Reporters also complained about the general speed of the news cycle and the need they feel to keep up with Twitter (they say that they really do need to, I think it’s something dumb that they’ve convinced themselves of).
PC game download service Steam released a new Terms Of Service Agreement today, and among the changes is a new clause that bans Valve’s customers from bringing class-action lawsuits against them and binds customers to arbitration. If you’re interested in the legalese, the new agreement states that:
YOU AND VALVE AGREE TO RESOLVE ALL DISPUTES AND CLAIMS BETWEEN US IN INDIVIDUAL BINDING ARBITRATION. THAT INCLUDES, BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO, ANY CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO: (i) ANY ASPECT OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN US; (ii) THIS AGREEMENT; OR (iii) YOUR USE OF STEAM, YOUR ACCOUNT OR THE SOFTWARE. IT APPLIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER SUCH CLAIMS ARE BASED IN CONTRACT, TORT, STATUTE, FRAUD, UNFAIR COMPETITION, MISREPRESENTATION OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY.
And also that:
YOU AND VALVE AGREE NOT TO BRING OR PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION, PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ACTION OR COLLECTIVE ARBITRATION, EVEN IF AAA’s PROCEDURES OR RULES WOULD OTHERWISE ALLOW ONE. THE ARBITRATOR MAY AWARD RELIEF ONLY IN FAVOR OF THE INDIVIDUAL PARTY SEEKING RELIEF AND ONLY TO THE EXTENT OF THAT PARTY’S INDIVIDUAL CLAIM.
This follows similar moves by both Sony and Microsoft on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles respectively. Both companies were following on the heels of AT&T, which instituted a similar waiver in their Terms Of Service at least as far back as 2006. The State of California passed a law banning such clauses, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that states do not have the power to implement such laws, and so these waivers are currently legal in the U.S. I do not know of a case where such a waiver has ever been tested in another jurisdiction, so I can’t speak to their legality elsewhere.
When disagreements about the role of unions in our society come up, supporters of unions will often point out that unions were at the forefront of fighting for many of the elements of our working lives that we consider important, like limiting the standard working week to 5 days and 40 hours, the Canadian Pension Plan, equal pay for equal work for women in the workforce, 2 weeks paid vacation per year (more in much of Europe), etc.
In response, detractors of unions will often say that, sure, those things are important, but now we live in a different society where those kinds of things are guaranteed and now unions are just being greedy and fighting for things that aren’t affordable. So, here’s the thing that strikes me about that – people said the exact same things about the kinds of things unions fought for in the past that most people now appreciate. “We can’t afford it”, “unions are just being greedy”, etc., those are the kinds of arguments that have been used to fight against all manner of social progress for as long as unions and liberal democracy have existed.
I’ve mentioned this before and I think it’s worth repeating: if a certain kind of social progress has been necessary throughout human history up until the exact moment during which you live, that suggests that it’s probably worth taking a step back and examining whether the need for that kind of progress has really ceased to exist. It is of course possible that you do live during a moment in time during which that issue has been resolved; after all, if the issue ever is resolved, some set of people has to be the group to be alive at the time. But when history seems to come together in such a way that progress ceases to be necessary precisely when you’re the one being asked to fight for it or possibly sacrifice for it, it seems to me highly likely to me that there’s a little bit more going on and that we should reflect on what that might be.
