Jill Abramson and the lessons of “Emotional labor”

Jill Abramson

Like most journalism junkies, I’ve devoured pretty much every scrap of news and gossip I could get my hands on regarding Jill Abramson’s firing as executive editor of the New York Times. For a longtime reporter and a longtime lover of the Times, it’s been palace intrigue at its bloodiest, and therefore most riveting. 

It so happened that even as the Times fiasco unfolded, I’d been in the midst of studying a subject that’s fascinated me of late: “emotional labor.” The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term, and her 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling helped spur a raft of research concerning the influence of feelings in the workplace. Seeing the events of the past week through the prism of that research has been enlightening.

The term “emotional labor” refers to the effort it takes for employees in certain situations not to respond to the emotions their jobs cause them to feel, or to respond “appropriately,” i.e., in ways that won’t damage the bottom line of the businesses they work for. The field focuses largely on workers who interact with the public—airline stewardesses and customer service representatives, for example—but there’s also a fair amount of attention paid to internal relationships between employees and bosses. In both cases the hypothesis is that emotional labor is a form of stress that can be detrimental to workers’ health.

The customer is always right

Emotional labor has been defined as "the effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally-desired emotion during interpersonal transactions." This controlled emotional expression is a form of acting that is said to fall into one of two basic categories: Surface acting, wherein the outer expressions of inner feelings are controlled, and deep acting, wherein the person seeks to actually modify emotions that arise. 

The need to manage emotional expectations and reactions, and the consequences of failing to manage them, played a crucial role in Jill Abramson’s downfall. I’ll review here the most important reasons why that is so. My sources are two expansive articles on emotion work, one by Hochschild in the American Journal of Sociology, the other by Alicia Grandey in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.*

It’s important, first of all, to note the emotional context in which the reactions of the key figures in the Times drama played out. At least three distinct pairs of identity agendas were involved:

• Feminist management values vs. traditional (largely male) management values

• Shoe-leather journalism values vs. (inherited) management journalism values

• Old school, traditional print journalism values vs. new school digital journalism values

It’s less clear in the reporting of the Abramson imbroglio how a fourth pair of social values fit into the mix, but it has to be assumed that in some way they did. I refer to the black versus white values associated with the fact that one of the central figures, managing editor Dean Baquet, is black. Given the volatile sensitivities surrounding anything having to do with race, whatever part Baquet’s color played—specifically, how his color might have affected Baquet’s own emotional makeup and consequent reactions and behaviors—has been, from what I’ve seen, avoided, as it probably should have been. Nonetheless it would be naïve to believe race played no role whatsoever.

Dean Baquet

Despite that omission, no shortage of information has emerged describing the basic events that transpired, much of it demonstrating that various manifestations of emotional management and mismanagement had everything to do with the entire unfortunate episode.

In social situations we all react according to what Hochschild calls “a latent set of rules” dictated by the values of the groups to which we belong or would like to belong. These rules define what “conventions of feeling” are deemed appropriate in given situations, and these in turn define what types of emotional display are expected and “owed.” 

These emotional displays are often contrived, and deceptive. “Emotional labor may involve enhancing, faking, or suppressing emotions to modify the emotional expression,” Grandey says. For airline stewardesses and customer service representatives, “display rules” adhere to the principle that the customer is always right. Expectations within organizations can be more ambiguous, leading more easily to misinterpretation, offense and eventual conflict. This is especially true when the behaviors stem from different sets of values in which different “feeling rules” apply. As Hochschild puts it, “Feeling rules differ curiously from other types of rules in that they do not apply to action but to what is often taken as a precursor to action. Therefore they tend to be latent and resistant to formal codification.”

  

Figuring out the feeling rules becomes infinitely more confusing during periods of dramatic social and professional change. Explains Hochschild, “Part of what we refer to as the psychological effects of ‘rapid social change,’ or ‘unrest’ is a change in the relation of feeling rule to feeling and a lack of clarity about what the rule actually is, owing to conflicts and contradictions between contending sets of rules. Feelings and frames are deconventionalized, but not yet reconventionalized.” 

Like other rules, Hochschild adds, feeling rules can be halfheartedly obeyed or boldly broken. The penalty one risks for either action varies, but termination is among the possibilities. 

Jill Abramson’s role as the Times’ first female executive editor was a classic example of deconventionalized feelings and frames. The frantic pressure to adjust to the demands of the digital revolution poured more complexity into the emotional mix. “As some ideologies gain acceptance and others dwindle,” Hochschild says, “contending sets of feeling rules rise and fall.”

Whether we’re interacting with an irate customer or a demanding boss, we’ve all felt it necessary in work situations to act differently than we feel, or, put another way, not to act the way we feel. It’s considered a mark of maturity as well as employability to “manage” our emotions. The movie Office Space portrays, in the waitress character played by Jennifer Aniston, an employee who struggles with this problem. Repeatedly reprimanded by her boss for failing to display enough enthusiasm for her work—enthusiasm symbolized by the number of pieces of “flair” she’s willing to put on her uniform—she finally quits. This is an outcome frequently predicted and observed by emotional labor researchers. 

  

Office Space

Absurd as it may sound, Abramson’s troubles at the Times bear some resemblance to the troubles of Anniston’s character in Office Space. Certainly Abramson failed to fulfill the emotional expectations of her boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.. Like Aniston’s character, she basically lost her job because she was unwilling to engage in the types of emotional display required of team players. Whose fault that was obviously depends on who you talk to. Either Abramson was a bad manager, a bitch, or both, or she was inaccurately labeled as such, mainly because she was a woman who refused to conform to sexist stereotypes. Regardless of which is true, or more true, expectations based on conventions of feeling paved the way for Abramson’s departure. 

Abramson is clearly a dedicated feminist who takes her values, her integrity and her journalism very seriously, as the tattoo of the Times "T” logo on her back suggests. The idea of offering, in her role as executive editor, the sorts of emotional reassurances and comforts that women have traditionally been expected to provide would probably have struck her as emotionally dishonest. She didn’t get where she was by playing the nice girl and I suspect she had no interest in adopting that role once she’d risen to the top. To do so would have been a betrayal of her basic values. It was a different story when it came to supporting other women in the newsroom, which by all accounts Abramson did openly and enthusiastically.  

The Times logo

Writes Hochschild, “Rules for managing feeling are implicit in any ideological stance; they are the ‘bottom side’ of ideology.” Refusing to conform to the feeling rules defined for a certain role suggests “an ideology lapsed or rejected.”

  

Abramson’s professional history as a hard-hitting investigative reporter provided another set of values that would have made her reluctant to play nice with Sulzberger and his new CEO, Mark Thompson. Janet Malcom famously pointed out that reporters routinely hide their true feelings when they’re trying to win the confidence of their sources. In most other situations, however, they like to think of themselves as truth tellers. (I say this as someone who worked for more than a decade as an investigative reporter.) Honesty rates much higher on the value scale than making things look good. That’s why Abramson refused to go along with Sulzberger’s offer to construct a face-saving explanation of her departure for public consumption. Fuck that, I’m sure she said, to herself if not directly to Sulzberger. I’m not going to lie just to make this easier for you.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

(Ron Howard’s 1994 movie The Paper offers a fine portrait of the dynamic I’m talking about here, with Michael Keaton playing the Abramson role and Spalding Gray playing the Sulzberger role.) 

What of Dean Baquet’s role in the affair? For whatever reasons he seems constitutionally to be more attentive to feeling rules than Abramson. He hadn’t been told, for example, that Abramson planned to hire the Guardian’s Janine Gibson to be Baquet’s co-managing editor. Baquet kept his feelings to himself when he learned of this over lunch with Gibson, but he reportedly expressed his dismay in no uncertain terms during a dinner with Sulzberger two days later, apparently suggesting or stating outright that he would resign rather than continue working with Abramson. 

  

In the wake of an earlier disagreement, Baquet had walked out of Abramson’s office and slammed his fist into a wall—an uncharacteristic loss of emotional control for which he subsequently apologized, publicly. "The newsroom doesn't need to see one of its leaders have a tantrum,” he told Politico. While managing editor of the Los Angeles Times during a period when management was imposing repeated rounds of editorial cutbacks, Baquet eventually decided he'd had enough and dramatically resigned. Some who worked there at the time, however, have noted that up to that point Banquet had handled the bloodletting with notable composure. “He was a grownup about it,” one colleague told the Washington Post. “He was not the kind to go pout.”

These characteristics suggest that Baquet fits Alicia Grandey’s description of a “high self-monitoring” individual, while Abramson may be the opposite. “High self-monitors,” Grandey writes, “are more aware of the emotional cues of others and are more willing and able to change their own emotional expression to fit the situation than low self-monitors. Low self-monitors tend to remain ‘true’ to their internal feelings.”

Photo posted on Instagram by Abramson's daughter, post-firing

It isn’t likely, then, that Baquet, a lover of fine clothes, fine art, fine cars and fine cigars, will demonstrate his loyalty to the Times by having its logo tattooed on his back. Nor is a picture of him wearing a t-shirt and boxing gloves likely to appear on Instagram. There doesn’t seem to be any question that the emotional content of Baquet’s management style will contrast sharply with Abramson’s. He’s known as a cheerleader, one who can be counted on to actively and generously offer feeling support. As Dylan Byers of Politico put it, “He cares about newsroom morale and he cares about being liked.”

  

I mentioned above that we typically feel we have a “right” to expect certain types of emotional response from those we encounter, depending on how we perceive ourselves in relation to them, just as we feel we “owe” certain types of emotional response to others. Sulzberger, in one of his post-firing statements, complained that Abramson didn’t offer the sorts of feeling displays that he and others on the Times masthead deserved. "During her tenure,” he said, “I heard repeatedly from her newsroom colleagues, women and men, about a series of issues, including arbitrary decision-making, a failure to consult and bring colleagues with her, inadequate communication and the public mistreatment of colleagues."

Again, whether Sulzberger’s version is the correct version depends on who you talk to. For him, an appropriate manifestation of feeling display presumably would have included a healthy measure of deference. Failing to adequately satisfy that expectation may have been one of Abramson’s mistakes, but it’s hard to know that for sure. Aside from her suspicions that she hadn’t been receiving pay commensurate with that of her male predecessors, the day-to-day quality of Abramson’s working relationship with Sulzberger is another point that hasn’t received much attention in the press. It’s clear in any case that a more emotionally acceptable candidate for the job—Dean Banquet—was waiting in the wings. 

No doubt the sympathies among those remaining at the Times are divided, and no doubt the trauma of the affair has left a trove of unsettled emotions that will take time to sort out. As Grandey puts it, “An emotional event may lead to more emotional regulation when that event results in emotions that are discrepant from the organizational display rules." 

In other words, for the time being you can expect that a lot of folks at the Times will be keeping their heads down.

*Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Nov., 1979), p. 551-575; Grandey, “Emotion Regulation in the Workplace: A New Way to Conceptualize Emotional Labor.” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol. 5., No. 1 (2000), p. 95-110.

©Doug Hill, 2014 

Has Morality Become a Skeuomorph?

An early strategy for making new technology feel familiar

I was thinking this morning about two subjects that don't usually go together, skeuomorphs and morality.

A skeuomorph is a design element applied to a product that looks as if it's functional but really isn't. Its real purpose is to evoke a sense of familiarity and comfort. The literary critic N. Katherine Hayles cites as an example the dashboard of her Toyota Camry, which is made of synthetic plastic molded to look as if it's stitched fabric. 

Software designers use lots of skeuomorphs for their user interfaces; examples include the "pages" that seem to "turn" in e-readers and word processing programs. Hayles calls skeuomorphs “threshold devices." They "stitch together past and future," she says, "reassuring us that even as some things change, others persist."

For a few months last year Apple Computer took a lot of flack from the design cognoscenti for its dedication to skeuomorphs; the linen texture that appears as background on the iPod and the wooden bookshelf used for the iBook display were frequently cited examples. The company's skeuomorph aesthetic was said to be a legacy of Steve Jobs, who was convinced people needed recognizable touchstones to ease them through the uncharted expanses of cyberspace. 

Enough! cried the cognoscenti. The time for such reassurance has long since ended! So it was that cheers greeted the firing in October of Apple's software leader, Scott Forstall, carrier of the skeuomorphic torch, as well as the introduction of Microsoft's sleek new Metro Design, which doesn't pretend to be anything other than pixels on a screen. 

Apple's iBooks display

Although I'm pretty sensitive to the look and feel of things, my thoughts about skeuomorphs this morning had nothing to do with user interfaces. Rather I was thinking that perhaps the idea of a skeuomorph might be applied outside the domain of design, specifically to the realm of ethics. 

It seems likely that in an era of mass-market technology morality has become – not always, but often – a skeuomorph: a feature that's retained for the sake of appearances rather than any practical function. Any function, that is, other than that of reassuring people that even as some things change, others persist.

These admittedly dark thoughts were prompted by reading the cover story in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." Reporter Michael Moss describes in brilliant detail the lengths to which America's biggest food and beverage conglomerates have gone to design products we can't get enough of, literally. Their profits and our waistlines get fatter. They prosper, we don't.

Moss opens the piece by telling the story of an extraordinary summit meeting of food industry leaders, convened in Minneapolis in 1999 by a Pillsbury executive named James Behnke. Among those in attendance were the presidents or CEOs of Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Mars, and Coca-Cola. 

Behnke called the meeting to discuss the implications for their businesses of the nation's skyrocketing rates of obesity. Health officials and physicians' groups were sounding alarms: Obesity was a health-care catastrophe in the making, especially among children, and the products sold by the men at Behnke's meeting were a major cause of the problem.

Behnke, a chemist with a doctorate in food science, believed it was time the industry addressed the obesity issue, not only because it was threatening to become a public relations liability, but also because the health officials and physician's groups were right: the industry did bear some responsibility for undermining the health of its customers. His feelings were shared by a vice president from Nabisco named Michael Mudd, who presented to the assembled executives an obesity primer, describing with the help of some 114 slides the scale of the epidemic and the threat it posed to the packaged food industry. 

 

Mudd then offered a series of recommendations. First, he said, the industry should acknowledge that its products were more fattening than they needed to be. Second, the industry should vow to do something about it. He suggested a three-step course of remedial action that began with a program of scientific research to determine what was causing people to eat more than was good for them. Once that was determined, the industry could reformulate its products to reduce their harmful ingredients and devise a nutritional code for its marketing and advertising campaigns.

It would be lovely to report that Mudd's presentation was greeted with a standing ovation and an impassioned, consensual vow to go forth and reform America's packaged foods marketplace for the sake of the people. That didn't happen. According to Moss, the next person to speak was Stephen Sanger, who at the time was leading General Mills to record profits by selling just the sort of fat-, sugar-, and salt-filled products being blamed for the obesity explosion. 

 

A General Mills success story: a "health food" with twice the sugar per serving as the children's cereal, Lucky Charms

Sanger wanted no part of Mudd's remedial program, or, for that matter, his guilt. General Mills had always acted perfectly responsibly, he said, not only toward its customers but also toward its shareholders. Consumers buy what they like, and they like products that taste good. General Mills was in the business of selling products that satisfy those tastes and had no intention of doing anything else. His competitors, Sanger suggested, should do the same. On that note, Moss reports, the summit meeting ended.

That these captains of industry would proceed, with endless creativity and ambition, to fill the shelves of American supermarkets with mountains of unhealthy, wasteful, dishonest products, knowing the pernicious effects those products would likely have on the well-being of millions of consumers, was the source of my dark thoughts this morning. 

It's hard not to conclude from examples such as these – and there are many others – that in the pursuit of corporate power moral restraint becomes – not always, but often – a  skeuomorph, a decorative element that pretends, for reassurance's sake, to be functional, but really isn't. There's nothing new about greed, of course. The difference is the scale of mendacity advanced technologies put at our disposal, and the ease with which checks on mendacity are discarded. The only justifications required: consumers will buy it and stockholders will profit.

The divorce of technology from morality is a theme that was sounded repeatedly by the philosopher who has most influenced my thinking on matters such as these, Jacques Ellul.

As I've explained elsewhere, Ellul pictured technology as a unified entity that relentlessly and aggressively expands its range of influence. Ellul used the term "technique" to underscore his conviction that technology must be seen as a way of thinking as well as an ensemble of machines and machine systems. Technique includes the methods and strategies that drive those systems, as well as the quantitative mentality that drives those methods and strategies. The invention, production, distribution, and marketing of addictive junk foods are all manifestations of technique. 

Jacques Ellul

The single overriding value of technique, Ellul repeatedly said, is efficiency. Worries about morality are obstacles in the attainment of efficiency, except where the brutality of efficiency's pursuit causes concerns that might produce resistance, and interference. "It is a principle characteristic of technique that it refuses to tolerate moral judgments," Ellul wrote in 1954. "It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain." 

Moral "flourishes" remain, he added, but only for the sake of appearances. In reality, "None of that has any more importance than the ruffled sunshade of McCormick's first reaper. When these moral flourishes overly encumber technical progress, they are discarded – more or less speedily, with more or less ceremony, but with determination nonetheless. This is the state we are in today."

At the time of the food summit in Minneapolis, it's clear James Behnke hadn't fully acclimated himself to those conditions. Stephen Sanger apparently had. 

(For a related post, see Autonomy continued: Technology or Capitalism?)

©Doug Hill, 2013

 

Emma W.

Emma Whitehead

In case anyone was wondering, the argument here is not that ALL technologies are bad. 

Earlier this week the New York Times reported an amazing medical achievement. 

Emma Whitehead, a seven-year-old girl from Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, was dying from acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Two rounds of chemotherapy had failed. Time was running out. 

In desperation her parents approved a radical new therapy. Doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia "reprogrammed" Emma's immune system by genetically altering some of her blood cells with a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDs. The reprogrammed cells, injected back into Emma's body, had been turned into super cancer fighters. They attacked and killed the cells that were causing her leukemia. 

Emma almost didn't survive the process, which takes a terrible toll on the body. Now, however, she's thriving.

This treatment is about as high tech as you can get (read the article for details on how complicated it is) – there's nothing natural about it. Nor is it going to become widely available without someone finding a way to make a profit on it, meaning some patients will get the treatment and others won't. And yes, the health-care system in general is desperately in need of reform, and yes, there are big-picture questions about our obsessive use of technologies to prolong life at any cost. 

But forget all that for now. Emma Whitehead, second grader, is alive and well, reading voraciously and loving recess.

Who can argue with that? 






Photo credit:Jeff Swensen, The New York Times 

©Doug Hill, 2012

Everything is Connected (Wet Blanket Edition)

 

Living with the effects of global warming isn't only going to be harder. It's going to be less fun.

A couple of recent dispatches make the point:

1) Lots of people who love to ski will have to find another hobby. According to a report yesterday in the New York Times, as global warming continues, scores of the nation’s winter resorts, especially those at lower elevations and latitudes, won't have any snow to offer their customers.

The Times quotes one study's prediction that no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts is likely to be economically viable by 2039, while more than half of those in Maine and New York will go under. Another report said that the industry has already lost more than a billion dollars in revenue due to warming. 

Some in the industry are confident that snow-making technology will make up for any short-falls caused by climate change. There's a problem with that scenario, though. Snow-making requires water, and warming not only reduces snow, it reduces rainfall. After a year of record drought, the Times says, "reservoirs are depleted, streams are low, and snowpack levels stand at 41 percent of their historical average." 

2) The second report, in The Daily Beast, describes an impending gastronomic disaster of epic proportions: "The End of Pasta."

Wheat is a cool weather crop, which makes it the most vulnerable of our basic grains (rice and corn are the others) to global warming. According to reporter Mark Hertsgaard, predictions are that if current trends continue, global wheat production could decline by as much as 27 percent by 2050.

Bakeries will obviously suffer under such conditions, but pasta production will suffer more because the variety of wheat used to make pasta – durum wheat – is especially sensitive to climate change. Already shifts in rainfall patterns are forcing farmers in North Dakota, where some of the world's finest durum wheat is grown, to move their operations west. If warming continues, they may have to stop raising durum wheat altogether.

An ironic twist puts the durum wheat crop in North Dakota at even greater risk. Fracking has turned the state into an epicenter of one of the biggest oil booms in American history. As a result, land once used to grow durum wheat is now being paved over for oil pumps and gas pipelines, all busily producing fuels that are pushing the planet's temperature higher, faster. According to Hertsgaard, the flaring of natural gas that occurs during fracking is itself a major contributor to global warming. 

North Dakota isn't the world's only source of durum wheat, or even its most important one. That honor, Hertsgaard says, goes to the Mediterranean basin. Unfortunately, predictions are that climate change will hit that region even harder than it's hitting North Dakota.

Goodbye spaghetti, farewell, macaroni and cheese!

"Everything is Connected" is a recurring feature named in honor of the late Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is no such thing as a free lunch.
.  

Photos: Skier: Tech4Globe; Pasta: Jacksonville Organic Produce Delivery Service

Everything is Connected (Global Chaos Edition)

Queens, New York, after Hurricane Sandy

So much for denial. A report commissioned by the CIA and other security agencies confronts head on what our political leaders are afraid to mention: The various forms of chaos that will be unleashed by global warming. 

Among developments the report says that the nation's defense and intelligence establishments need to prepare for, according to the New York Times:

• large populations displaced by flood and famine,
• rampant spread of disease,
• increasing conflict over decreasing resources,
• relief agencies overwhelmed by the scope and scale of need, and
• the necessity of military action to curb violence or protect vital interests.

The report predicts that global warming will impose what the Times describes as "unparalleled strains" on government resources in the coming years. These strains will be the result of "more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems."

The National Research Council, which the Times calls "the nation’s top scientific research group," produced the report. It was originally to be presented to intelligence officials on the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, but had to be delayed because the federal government was shut down. Lead author John D. Steinbruner told the Times that Sandy provided a preview of the sorts of disruptions we can expect to see more of in the future. 

"You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm," he said. "But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.” 

Post-Sandy repairs, Bronx, New York

The report says the U.S. military is not taking adequate steps to prepare for the disruptions that are expected to occur. It specifically warns of the collapse of "globally integrated systems that provide for human well-being." That's a reference to a condition I've written about frequently in this space, "technological autonomy," a shorthand way of describing the fact that nations around the world are now utterly dependent on massively complex, tightly coupled technological systems that are highly vulnerable to chain-reaction breakdowns.

The Times article ends by noting that even as the urgency of preparing for global warming has grown, the willingness of politicians to provide the funding necessary to do so has declined. 

"Everything is Connected" is a recurring feature named in honor of the late Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. 

Photo Credits: Queens destruction: Spencer Platt - AFP/Getty Images; Bronx power lines: Don Emmert - AFP/Getty Images.

Talking Technology! (On Technological Entanglement)

I've confessed before to an annoying fondness for saying "I told you so." Still, I can't help but note that an article in the New York Times this morning affirms arguments that are regular themes here.

The article is a profile of computer scientist Peter G. Neumann, who has warned for decades that the complexity of the computer systems we rely on makes it "virtually impossible" (as the Times put it) to assure that they'll run reliably and safely. 

Neumann is recognized as one of the nation's leading experts on computer security. Nonetheless the hardware and software industries have consistently ignored his predictions that the products they sell, as they proliferate, will become increasingly vulnerable to breakdown and attack. His mantra is that complex systems break in complex ways, a principle that's been vindicated by legions of computer bugs and viruses, regular reports of massive data breaches and thefts, and growing fears of cyber warfare.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems’ nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Neumann's current project, Clean Slate, has been funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It's an effort to rethink computer design from the ground up. The goal: an entirely new race of machines that's simpler, more stable, and less easily violated. 

If that sounds idealistic, it is, and Neumann knows better than to expect eager assent from the digital establishment.

“I’ve been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” he tells the Times' John Markoff. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don’t want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.”

Again, forgive me for pointing out how clearly this echoes themes I harp on regularly in this space (though certainly not original to me). Recent examples include "On immovable technologies," "Recycling Ellen Ullman," and "Technological Autonomy: Greasing the rails to Armageddon."

The broader point to be emphasized is that the systemic nature of technology – and the fallibility that's an inevitable consequence of that systemic nature – is not only an issue in the world of computers. It applies to the  technological society as a whole. Peter Neumann's argument that the complexity of digital systems makes them unstable and insecure can be extended to the inconceivably complex web of technological systems that now dominate the ecosystem we inhabit.

If it's difficult to imagine starting over with a "clean slate" in the world of computers, how much more difficult is it to imagine rethinking and rebuilding the entire technological edifice on which we depend, regardless of how unstable that edifice might be? As I've said before, it's not a problem we seem prepared to contemplate.

©Doug Hill, 2012

 

Talking Technology! (No Free Lunch edition)

The New York Times published a superb report yesterday (the first part of a series) on the massive, and massively wasteful, power consumption that drives the Internet.

The article is notable not only for its reporting but also for its appreciation of the underlying issues.

Specifically it emphasizes that the Internet is not, as we'd like to believe, an entity that exists in some friction-less, dream-like realm called "cyberspace" or "the cloud." In truth, the Internet isn't "virtual" at all: It runs on such Earth-bound realities as diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, not to mention huge amounts of electricity and substantial amounts of pollution.

Here are some quotes:

Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation.

At least a dozen major data centers have been cited for violations of air quality regulations in Virginia and Illinois alone, according to state records. Amazon was cited with more than 24 violations over a three-year period in Northern Virginia, including running some of its generators without a basic environmental permit.

Each year, chips in servers get faster, and storage media get denser and cheaper, but the furious rate of data production goes a notch higher.

With no sense that data is physical or that storing it uses up space and energy, [Internet users] have developed the habit of sending huge data files back and forth, like videos and mass e-mails with photo attachments. Even the seemingly mundane actions like running an app to find an Italian restaurant in Manhattan or a taxi in Dallas requires servers to be turned on and ready to process the information instantaneously.

“If you tell somebody they can’t access YouTube or download from Netflix, they’ll tell you it’s a God-given right,” said Bruce Taylor, vice president of the Uptime Institute, a professional organization for companies that use data centers.

A crash or a slowdown could end a [data center manager's] career…A field born of cleverness and audacity is now ruled by something else: fear of failure.

 “When somebody says, ‘I’m going to store something in the cloud, we don’t need disk drives anymore’ — the cloud is disk drives,” Mr. Victora said. “We get them one way or another. We just don’t know it.”

“That’s what’s driving that massive growth — the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere,” said David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief of research at Gartner, the technology research firm. “We’re what’s causing the problem.”

Annals of Childish Behavior™ (continued)

On "The Innocence of Muslims":

Morning Edition, National Public Radio:

Fawaz Gerges is a Muslim scholar and professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He says the film…"gathers up all the historical falsities spread about Mohammad for centuries and includes them in one film" — or, actually, a 14 minute trailer.

Gail Collins, New York Times:

The trailer looks as though it was made by a 13-year-old boy with access to a large supply of fake beards.

 Audio soundbite from the trailer: 

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I have not seen such a murderous thug as Muhammad. He kills men, captures women and children, robs the caravans, breaches agreements and treaties. He sells the children as slaves after he and his men have used them.

Is modern culture being overwhelmed by an epidemic of childishness? José Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1930, thought so. Annals of Childish Behavior™ chronicles contemporary examples of that epidemic. The childish citizen, Ortega said, puts "no limit on caprice" and behaves as if "everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations."

Talking Technology!

The New York Times reports today that some American companies are making big profits selling a gas that's been banned by international treaty because it damages the ozone.

   
The gas, HCFC-22, is used to repair older air conditioners; newer machines don't use it. There's a flourishing market smuggling it into countries where it's illegal or exporting it to countries where it's legal.

DuPont makes more HCFC-22 than it can sell legally in the States and exports it to countries like Mexico. Marcone, a major supplier of appliance parts based in St. Louis, was recently convicted of selling smuggled HCFC-22 to American retailers with a discount promotion it called "Freaky Freon Fridays." A federal prosecutor testified that the senior vice president in charge of the operation was considered "a hero" in the company because of the revenue he was bringing in.

Indeed, the profits involved in selling HCFC-22 are such that it's actually becoming more abundant and cheaper on the global market than it had been before the treaty banning it went into effect, the Times says.

The vast amount of goods shipped internationally in the global economy makes it easy to smuggle HCFC-22. According to the Times, some of the gas sold by Marcone was made in the U.S., sold to Mexico, then smuggled back into the States. Another shipment had been manufactured in China and exported to Ireland and the Dominican Republic before being shipped by freighter to Miami, hidden in cargo containers among other, legal goods. Fake invoices were produced to fool Customs inspectors.