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Notes EM: Fiction vs reality

evgenymorozov:

Tim Wu on my book:

Too much assault and battery creates a more serious problem: wrongful appropriation, as Morozov tends to borrow heavily, without attribution, from those he attacks. His critique of Google and other firms engaged in “algorithmic gatekeeping”is basically taken from Lessig’s first book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” in which Lessig argued that technology is necessarily ideological and that choices embodied in code, unlike law, are dangerously insulated from political debate. Morozov presents these ideas as his own and, instead of crediting Lessig, bludgeons him repeatedly. Similarly, Morozov warns readers of the dangers of excessively perfect technologies as if Jonathan Zittrain hadn’t been saying the same thing for the past 10 years. His failure to credit his targets gives the misimpression that Morozov figured it all out himself and that everyone else is an idiot.

What my book actually says:

Alas, Internet-centrism prevents us from grasping many of these issues as clearly as we must. To their credit, Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain have written extensively about digital preemption (and Lessig even touched on the future of civil disobedience). However, both of them, enthralled with the epochalist proclamations of Internet-centrism, seem to operate under the false assumption that digital preemption is mostly a new phenomenon that owes its existence to “the Internet,” e-books, and MP3 files. Code is law—but so are turnstiles. Lessig does note that buildings and architecture can and do regulate, but he makes little effort to explain whether the possible shift to code-based regulation is the product of unique contemporary circumstances or merely the continuation of various long-term trends in criminological thinking.

As Daniel Rosenthal notes in discussing the work of both Lessig and Zittrain, “Academics have sometimes portrayed digital preemption as an unfamiliar and novel prospect… In truth, digital preemption is less of a revolution than an extension of existing regulatory techniques.” In Zittrain’s case, his fascination with “the Internet” and its values of “openness” and “generativity,” as well as his belief that “the Internet” has important lessons to teach us, generates the kind of totalizing discourse that refuses to see that some attempts to work in the technological register might indeed be legitimate and do not necessarily lead to moral depravity.

One of the theoretical frames that I use in my dissertations is path dependency. Specifically, I consider whether early decisions with regards to Internet standards (small, early, decisions) actually lead to systems that are challenging to significantly change after systems relying on those protocols are widely adopted (i.e. big, late, decisions aren’t that influential). Once systems enjoy a network effect and see high levels of sunk capital, do they tend to be maintained even if something new comes along that is theoretically ‘superior’?

I mention this background in path dependency because a lot of the really interesting work in this field was written well before Lessig’s and Zittrain’s popular books (yes: there’s still excellent stuff being written today, but core literature predates Lessig or Zittrain). There’s also a extensive literature in public policy, with one of the more popular works being Tools of Government (1983). Hood, in Tools, that outlines how detectors and effectors work for institutions. Hood’s work, in part,  attends to how built infrastructure is used to facilitate governance; by transforming the world itself into a regulatory field (e.g. turnstiles, bridges and roads that possess particular driving characteristics, and so forth) the world becomes embedded with an aesthetic of regulation. This aesthetic can significantly ‘nudge’ the actions we choose to take. This thematic of ‘regulation by architecture’ is core to Lessig’s and Zittrain’s arguments, though there are no references to the ‘core books or sources’ that really launched some of this work in the academy.

This said, while there are predecessors that Lessig and Zittrain probably ought to have spent more time writing about, such complaints are true of practically any book or work that is designed to be read by the public and policy makers and academics. The real ‘magic’ of Zittrain and Lessig (and Morozov!) is that their works speak to a wide audience: their books are not, i would argue, written just for academics. As a result some of the nuance or specificity you’d expect in a $150 book that’s purchased by the other 10 specialists in your field is missing. And that’s ok.

Morozov’s key complaint, as I understand it, is that really important problems arise from how these authors’ books are perceived as what they are not. In other words, many people will not understand that many of the more populist books on ‘the Internet’ are being written by people with specific political intentions, who want their books to affect very particular public policy issues and that, as a consequence, these books and other writings have to be read as political works instead of ’dispassionate academic works’.* Their writings act as a kind of trojan horse through which particular ways of thinking of the world become ‘naturalized’, and the authors are ‘first’ to write on topics largely because of their skill in writing about the present while avoiding elongated literature reviews on the past.

I can appreciate Morozov’s concerns around language framing issues, and around the (sometimes) sloppy thinking of these authors. And I can appreciate Morozov’s critics who see him as being blunt and often similarly failing to ‘show all of his work’. For the public, however, I hope that they don’t necessarily see the very public conflicts between Morozov and his colleagues as necessarily an academic dispute in public so much as an unmasking and contestation of divergent political conceptions of the Internet and of literature more generally.

——-

* I write this on the basis of having attended conferences with American legal scholars working in this area. Papers and reports are often written with specific members of federal sub-committees, Congressional and Senate assistants, or federal/state justices in mind. In effect, these authors are writing for people in power to change specific laws and policies. As such you should always hunt for what is ‘really going on’ when reading most popular American legal scholarship.

Notes EM: Fiction vs reality

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AeroFS now open to the masses

Cunningham writes that AeroFS,

If you want access to the best features of Dropbox or one of its many competitors—automated file syncing between computers, a way to automatically keep old versions of your synced files, etc.—but you don’t want to keep your stuff in someone else’s cloud, AeroFS is a promising service. It can provide file syncing for many clients using your own local server (or, for businesses, Amazon S3 storage that you have more direct control over).

These are the kinds of projects that are really interesting to see come to fruition. In British Columbia there is pretty intense law that largely precludes public institutions from storing BC residents’ information outside of the province. The law has created a lot of consternation, especially amongst educators, who believe they can’t use ‘next generation’ tools in their classrooms.

Solutions like AeroFS start to bridge that divide, insofar as more and more ‘cloud’ services can be localized within the province and, as a result, be used by teachers and their students. In effect, such products can satisfy users’ demands while also complying with provincial law. Everyone wins.

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Bitcoin Malware Emerges

So, in line with my previous writing on why I’m skeptical of digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ars Technica has a piece of the newest malware hitting digital currencies:

In another example of the security mantra of “be careful what you click,” at least one Bitcoin trader has been robbed in a forum “phishing” attack designed specifically to ride the hype around the digital currency. The attack attempts to use Java exploits or fake Adobe updates to install malware, and it’s one of the first targeted attacks aimed at the burgeoning business of Bitcoin exchanges.

(…)

This type of attack is de rigeur in the financial world, according to George Waller, the executive vice president of Strikeforce Technologies, a security software firm specializing in two-factor authentication and anti-keylogging software for the financial industry. “Driving people to a site to download malware is one of the most common attacks today,” he told Ars. “You go to a site from a forum and get prompted for Java or Adobe updates—and in the majority of those updates they drop in a keylogger. Since they’re written to get around antivirus scans, AV software is useless against this sort of pervasive malware today.”

To be clear: such attacks are common against a host of perceived high-value targets. They also, however, underscore the real value in linking names, activity-types, purchase behaviour, and other distinctive characteristics to persons’ online economic activity to defray fraud made possible by malware.

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The Next Xbox Will Take Over Your TV

parislemon:

On the other hand:

Coupled with this TV functionality, Microsoft’s next-generation Kinect sensor will also play a role in the company’s TV focus. The Verge has learned that the next Kinect will detect multiple people simultaneously, including the ability to detect eye movement to pause content when a viewer turns their head away from a TV.

I really don’t understand this functionality. It sounds like a stupid novelty in the new Samsung Galaxy phone, and I think it’s worse here. Given how many people now “watch” TV with a second screen, is it going to pause every three seconds?

Words cannot express how pissed I would be if turning away from a TV meant that it paused what I was watching. I routinely walk away in dialogue heavy scenes to get a glass of water or whatever, and then return without having missed anything of substance. If I had to change a setting to enable this behaviour (i.e. what I’ve done my entire life) then I’d be annoyed as hell. I think this approach generally presumes that people should be actively just watching what’s on the screen and I really don’t know that many people who focus that hard on screen-based entertainment at home all that often.

Also: as cool as the Kinect is this is the kind of use case that bothers me about the technology more generally. Perpetually having an Internet-accessible series of cameras and microphones is one thing when I can control when they’re on or not: I don’t like the idea of them being ‘on’ when I’m not actively involved in a very specific operation that demands this kind of functionality. And, I mean, if Microsoft implements this there’s no way that advertisers or marketers aren’t going to want the data collected (in ‘aggregate and anonymous’, I’m sure) by the Kinect that’s watching and listening to everything you do within a 15ft radius of your TV.

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Notes EM: My FT oped: Google Revolution Isn’t Worth Our Privacy

evgenymorozov:

Google’s intrusion into the physical world means that, were its privacy policy to stay in place and cover self-driving cars and Google Glass, our internet searches might be linked to our driving routes, while our favourite cat videos might be linked to the actual cats we see in the streets. It also means that everything that Google already knows about us based on our search, email and calendar would enable it to serve us ads linked to the actual physical products and establishments we encounter via Google Glass.

For many this may be a very enticing future. We can have it, but we must also find a way to know – in great detail, not just in summary form – what happens to our data once we share it with Google, and to retain some control over what it can track and for how long.

It would also help if one could drive through the neighbourhood in one of Google’s autonomous vehicles without having to log into Google Plus, the company’s social network, or any other Google service.

The European regulators are not planning to thwart Google’s agenda or nip innovation in the bud. This is an unflattering portrayal that might benefit Google’s lobbying efforts but has no bearing in reality. Quite the opposite: it is only by taking full stock of the revolutionary nature of Google’s agenda that we can get the company to act more responsibly towards its users.

I think that it’s critically important to recognize just what the regulators are trying to establish: some kind of line in the sand, a line that identifies practices that move against the ethos and civil culture of particular nations. There isn’t anythingnecessarily wrong with this approach to governance. The EU’s approach suggests a deeper engagement with technology than some other nations, insofar as some regulators are questioning technical developments and potentialities on the basis of a legally-instantiated series of normative rights.

Winner, writing all the way back 1986 in his book The whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology, recognized that frank discussions around technology and the socio-political norms embedded in it are critical to a functioning democracy. The decisions we make with regards to technical systems can have far-reaching consequences, insofar as (some) technologies become ‘necessary’ over time because of sunk costs, network effects, and their relative positioning compared to competing products. Critically, technologies aren’t neutral: they are shaped within a social framework that is crusted with power relationships. As a consequence, it behooves us to think about how technologies enable particular power relations and whether they are relates that we’re comfortable asserting anew, or reaffirming again.

(If you’re interested in reading some of Winner’s stuff, check out his essay, “Do Artifacts Have Politics.”)

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What would have to change about the institutions behind Bitcoins (or a similar digital currency) before you’d consider using it?

The general issue I have with digital currencies that aren’t backed by reputable, insured, (and ideally well regulated) financial institutions is that they’re wickedly susceptible to theft. Some digital currency producers, like the humorous joke that the Canadian Mint is working on, out and out refuse to provide information to security researchers to test the crypto, anonymization systems, or surrounding security infrastructure associated with their products. Other products don’t stand up all that when when you apply a host of threat models (e.g. loss of digital credential, security of the public key infrastructure, etc).

So, what would I require before considering adopting stand-alone digital currency?

  1. A good, clear reason to prefer it over ‘real’ currency (e.g. it’s actually anonymized, or secure, or better trade value across borders to a wide host of parties, or something);
  2. A clear, demonstrable, means (based on public data) to confirm the security and reliability of the currency;
  3. A guarantee that instances of compromise of the computer or the communications channel won’t result in money vanishing from my ‘account’;
  4. A large enough adoption rate that owning the currency is useful for trade purposes.

I still don’t really ‘get’ the problem that Bitcoin is trying to ‘solve’ outside of edge cases (e.g. get money to Wikileaks). I get that some believe that Bitcoins are a kind of anonymous currency, but this is based more on myth than truth: it’s possible to recursively figure out how the coins ‘move’ between parties once you have a sufficiently sized data set. This means that the ‘banks’ that hold Bitcoins can actually massively trace who has possessed particular elements of the currency, who previously held those elements, and then tie this information with data outside the pure exchange of currency to identify the involved parties.

Ultimately, until it’s clear what problems these currencies are legitimately solving, and items 1-4 on the above list are met, I can’t imagine using Bitcoins or other digital currencies.

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Privacy Policies Don’t Need to Be Obtuse

Peter Fleischer has a good summary piece on the (miserable) state of online privacy policies today. As he writes:

Today, privacy policies are being written to try to do two contradictory things.  Like most things in life, if you try to do two contradictory things at the same time, you end up doing neither well.  Here’s the contradiction:  should a privacy policy be a short, simple, readable notice that the average end-user could understand? Or should it be a long, detailed, legalistic disclosure document written for regulators?  Since average users and expert regulators have different expectations about what should be disclosed, the privacy policies in use today largely disappoint both groups.

(…)

The time has come for a global reflection on what, exactly, a privacy policy should look like.  Today, there is no consensus.  I don’t just mean consensus amongst regulators and lawyers.  My suggestion would be to start by doing some serious user-research, and actually ask Johnny and Jean and Johann.

I entirely, fully, wholeheartedly agree: most policies today are absolute garbage. I actually read a lot of them – and research on social media policies will be online and available soon! – and they are more often than not an elaborate act of obfuscation than something that explains, specifically and precisely, what a service does or is doing with the data that is collected.

The thing is, these policies don’t need to be as bad as they are. It really is possible to bridge ‘accessible’ and ‘legalese’ but doing so takes time, care, and effort.

And fewer lawyers.

As a good example of how this can be done check out how Tunnelbear has written their privacy policy: it’s reasonably accessible and lacks a lot of the ‘weasel phrases’ you’ll find in most privacy policies. Even better, read the company’s Terms of Service document; I cannot express how much ‘win’ is captured in their simultaneously legal and layperson disclosure of how and why their service functions as it does.

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No, the internet isn’t sick. It also isn’t healthy.

How things are phrased matters a great deal. This is something that Evgeny Morozov has done good work examining over the past few years. Specifically, Morozov calls out thinkers and popular articles about technology as often pushing technology as a ‘solution’ to particular social issues (his most recent example is in The Babbler). Solutions, by strongly correlating technology with a ‘problem’, effectively become cast through very particular (often corporate) lenses that tend to hide or obscure the real problems, questions, or alternate solutions that might address – or (re)define – the issue(s) at hand.

To give you an idea of the kind of stuff that enrages Morozov (and, to a lesser extent, me), look no further than Cory Doctorow’s recent piece, titled “Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet.” In this case, the life of ‘the Internet’ is the key driver of the future of social issues related to speech and freedom. The first few paragraphs read as follow:

I’ve sat through more presentations about the way to solve the copyright wars than I’ve had hot dinners, and all of them has fallen short of the mark. That’s because virtually everyone with a solution to the copyright wars is worried about the income of artists, while I’m worried about the health of the internet.

Oh, sure, I worry about the income of artists, too, but that’s a secondary concern. After all, practically everyone who ever set out to earn a living from the arts has failed – indeed, a substantial portion of those who try end up losing money in the bargain. That’s nothing to do with the internet: the arts are a terrible business, one where the majority of the income accrues to a statistically insignificant fraction of practitioners – a lopsided long tail with a very fat head. I happen to be one of the extremely lucky lotto winners in this strange and improbable field – I support my family with creative work – but I’m not parochial enough to think that my destiny and the destiny of my fellow 0.0000000000000000001 percenters are the real issue here.

What is the real issue here? Put simply, it’s the health of the internet.

The regularized reference to the ‘health’ of the Internet is significant because it creates the lens through which the reader should, apparently, understand the dispute between rights holders and Internet users. From this way of thinking about a piece of technology it’s possible to think of the ‘net as an organism that can be either ‘sick’ or ‘healthy’. Given that we (presumably) tend not to see the Internet as a bacteria or virus deserving destruction it makes sense that we (almost automatically) want to search for ‘antibiotics’ to get the Internet healthy again. Doctorow frames that as resisting new copyright reforms and repealing past ones.

In effect, Doctorow’s framing of the issue personalizes and humanizes a socio-technical invention that is embedded in differential policy and cultural domains across the world. Moreover, he has cast ‘the Internet’ in a manner that predisposes your reaction to any solution: clearly, ‘the Internet’ should be kept healthy. (Unless you hate technology, of course.)

The article goes on to insist that copyright policies are being designed in a manner that is detrimental to free speech, privacy, and general good governance. That’s fine. But it’s not the point that most readers are going to walk away with, and that’s unfortunate. As it stands, the ‘copyright wars’ seem to be never-ending, and we keep seeing these very popular pieces that are crafted to draft new recruits into the ‘armies’. Personally, I’d prefer that the ‘generals’ of the various sides actually engage in conversation about the relationship between copyright, freedom of speech, freedom of publication, and the power relationships between corporate, governmental, and citizens’ interests. I’d rather we get a real public debate instead of (seeming) non-stop sloganeering.

I should note that Cory isn’t just a ‘solutionist’. He really does ‘get’ the significance of talking about the ‘net as an organism: by doing so people can more directly – and quickly – connect with ‘saving’ it. It’s surprisingly hard to talk about ‘saving’ something when doing so entails learning an awful lot about complex policy and social rights issues. So, in the case of this article, I think you’re witnessing a particular epistemic elite crafting language to achieve very specific political goals.

And that’s what’s important. By phrasing language, as he has, Doctorow is committing to a specific political maneuver by way of embedding in people’s minds that copyright is the equivalent of a Japanese whaler going after a rare soon-to-be-extinct whale. It’s a helpful kind of thought-worm to implant. But it also obscures the power politics and policy wonkery and just plain silliness involved in the whole copyright ‘issue.’ It also makes you choose if you’re ‘for’ a ‘living’ or a ‘dead’ Internet: why can’t I be for a middle position? What is that middle position? Does a ‘live’ Internet mean a ‘dead’ copyright? Can I get a ‘semi-living’ Internet along with only a ‘half-dead’ copyright?

Strong statements – and rhetoric – like Doctorow’s and other elites in the copyright wars are as meant to obscure potential avenues of thinking as they are to make clear how to ‘fix’ problems. Doctorow does a good job in getting people riled up, which is part of his ‘job’ as an activist, but I’m not confident that after two decades we shouldn’t be moving towards a more nuanced debate. I’m also just sick and tired of ‘war’ language.

I think that it’s increasingly important to focus on positive solutions. Copyright reformists (like me!) have about as much chance successfully framing policy solutions to copyright using war language as we do spearing Moby Dick. And I’d rather stop chasing white whales.

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The DEA, iMessage, and the Broader Significance

It’s been widely reported that the DEA San Jose office is unable to conduct surveillance of Apple iMessages. The note is revealing in its very phrasing; the author(s) state that:

While it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices, iMessages between an Apple device and a non-Apple device are transmitted as Short Message Service (SMS) messages and can sometimes be intercepted, depending on where the intercept is placed. The outcome seems to be more successful if the intercept is placed on the non-Apple device. (emphasis added)

Note that despite the ‘encryption’ the agent(s) recognize that they can sometimes intercept messages. Importantly they are ‘more successful’ when the intercept is on the non-Apple device. Their phrasing suggests one of the following:

  1. Authorities are occasionally able to intercept messages between Apple devices; or
  2. Authorities are occasionally able to intercept messages that are inbound to an Apple device that are sent from a non-Apple device.

Either situation is interesting, insofar as the former raises questions of the efficacy of Apple’s encryption process and the latter questions about where a tap is placed pre-encryption in the Apple network.

More broadly, however, the challenge facing the DEA is one that is already encountered by investigators around the world. In fact, the DEA is in a pretty envious position: most of the major ‘messaging’ companies have some degree of corporate presence in the US and can thus be easily served with a wiretap order. Sure, a host of orders might need to be issued (one to Apple, one to Facebook, one to Google, etc etc) but this is a possible course of action.

Officers outside of the US that want similar access to messages that flow outside of SMS channels experience a different reality. They tend to need a MLAT or other cross-national warrant might be needed. Such warrants are incredibly time consuming and, as a result, resource intensive. These kinds of pressures are, in part, responsible for the uptick in discussions around state agents serving malware to mobile and fixed computing systems: it just isn’t practical to ‘wiretap’ many of these communications anymore, on the basis that the companies running the services are beyond the authorities’ jurisdictions.

So, while encryption is (fortunately) becoming more and more common, this isn’t necessarily the ‘solution’ to third-parties intercepting communications. Indeed, all it means is that attackers (in this case, the state) are targeting the far softer domains of the communications infrastructure: everything around the encryption layer itself.

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Tower of Sleep: You’re Fucked, and You’re Probably to Blame.

karengregory:

In 2009, theChronicle of Higher Educationran an “advice” piece entitled “Graduate School in the Humanities: Don’t Go.” In the article, Professor William Pannapacker (ironically of Hope College) proceeded to get real and lay down some truth for aspiring seekers of higher education: there are no jobs, you will grow old trying to get one, you will be poor and in debt (and did we mention old, particularlywomen, who age so much more decisively, what with your womb clocks and all), and you will become angry and embittered by your failures to secure stable employment. This hit a nerve. And probably because that particular nerve rarely gets sleep and likes to wake many of us up at 4:15 in the morning, we are aware that Professor Pannapacker speaks a certain truth. The world that many graduate students are trying to enter is broken and there are no easy roads to security. Even if we manage to grab hold of a rare job, the future of working as an academic looks pretty bleak. So why don’t those of us who understand this pack up and leave?

If we listen to Rebecca Schuman, who recently updated Pannapacker’s screed for 2013 inSlate, it’s because we were too stupid to heed his message, suggesting that the original article “convinced no one.” And, as Schuman writes, “It certainly didn’t convince me! Why? Because Pannapacker is a tenured professor. He pulled it off, so why can’t you? After all, someone has to get these jobs.” Yes, perhaps we are stupid and optimistic and blind. In some situations, like when the world is going to shit, sometimes these aren’t the worst things to be. But I don’t think it’s that we’re all just sitting unaware that the sky is falling and hoping it won’t fall on us. Some of us, as Tressie Cottom suggests on her blog, are trying our best to be “brave” and we are trying to stick around in this shitstorm of terrible labor practices, endless competition for scarce jobs, nasty administrative choices (like the president of CUNY calling grad students “roaches” or, even worse, pepper spraying our undergraduates who have dared to question the vision for higher education in this country) because we care and we want to change it. Or, because even if the university succeeds in chasing us out, we haven’t failed by completing a PhD.

There are many reasons why these screeds of “Don’t go! Graduate School will ruin your life” leave me wanting to kick the wall. Yes, things suck. I make no bones about that, but these screeds overlook the work that students are doing to organize, agitate, and resist the restructuring of higher education. And this oversight raises the question: if you realized the Pannapacker “Truth,” then did you then get involved in your union, in an activist group, in an education alternative (like the Free University), or in a conversation with your students? When did you start realizing that a career in academics also means addressing the very conditions of our labor? What have you done besides comparing the kind of tenacity it takes to be a graduate student today to being a willful smoker who smokes “four packs a day” and hopes to not get cancer?

As someone who has had cancer, I’m a little offended, but I’m also deeply aware thatthere are no self-interested choices that can really save you. This is true in academics as well. We’re finding ourselves in a world where “doing the right thing,” including staying on the straight and narrow path that may or may not culminate in tenure, is not enough.There is a cold logic of privatization at work in these “don’t go” screeds. This logic foregrounds an “every man for himself” mentality, which mirrors the very toxic culture of academics that so closely binds self-worth and research production. To what degree have we internalized this toxicity when we suggest to others that they should “save themselves”? This is not to say that we should not be very angry about the state of the job market, but to ask how does such privatization lead us away from addressing larger, structural issues at play here?

In addition to this, everyone should readTressie’spost. It is smart, impassioned, and on the money response to these “reality checks.” Too many of “some” people have gone on to higher education, but too many others simply haven’t. What happens if “you can’t do better” than go to school? I agree with Tressie that the “Truth” of the “don’t go” advice is not entirely wrong and that we need to be very clear with prospective students about the road ahead of them and the placement of financial burden, but just because we may not see the future clearly for ourselves is no reason to throw the entire institution under the bus. Are we really ready to say that higher education is no longer a link to mobility?

If so, we have some serious thinking to do about what life is this country is about and what such a “no future” really looks like. I am not ready to accept that fate. Many of us are not, which is probably part of why we stick around in our adjunct positions.We know that when and if we leave, our students will be even more on their own—and we also know that the wolves are circling, ready to MOOC-ify the classroom, by which I mean get rid of it entirely and truly strip education down even further. This is really the big issue here, and I wish that more graduate students would realize that participating in the freakout over tenure is a drain on energy that would better be used to stand up to the larger forces that are eager to break the tie between education and mobility, particularly in the public university.

This is not to say don’t freak out, but send the energy outward. Make it social. Organize. Read the news and reject this bullshit mantra of private failure. My guess is that it is this type of mental resilience and recasting of shame (like we see happening around student debt) that will need regardless of where we work.

Also, grad students: If the following is true of your experience, where have you gone to graduate school and how do those very programs needs to be modified:

During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)

CUNY may be a rare case, but it has not been as lonely as this. Nor has it suggested to me that my entire selfismy research. Perhaps because we are public, scraping along, working full-time, parenting, and teaching, we are a little more pissed off then other graduate students? But students here talk to one another. They create community. If I had not gone back to school, I would not have had the chance to learn alongside of some of these truly brilliant, radical people.So, if you ask me about graduate school, I will tell you it sucks, but I will also say: Flock to the Public Universities. Demand access and entry to higher education. Nothing will be easy when you get there. But we cannot afford to leave the university to those currently in charge of it.PhDs, we need you.

This is why the fight for free education matters. Changing the discourse around education is crucial to changing the discourse (and the reality) of income inequality and social mobility in general.

I think that, intellectually, the desire to reform the academy is admirable.

But I can’t image it succeeding or, by the time that it does, it’s going to be pretty late for the entire massive set of graduates who are trying – still – to find marginally meaningful work. Is this a pretty individualistic and pessimistic view of things? Yep, totally. But the collective isn’t going to pay my rent. Or my cats’ vet bills. Or put food on my family’s table. From my position, based on being amongst grad students for going on 2 decades now (another discussion, but no, my parents aren’t professors or permanent staff), things aren’t measurably improving: the same problems are being discussed, but they’re more dire each and every year.

There are long-term fiscal challenges that are associated with a PhD, especially immediately after graduating from the academy. Most have to discover new networks. Even more have to convince those networks that they are capable despite often lacking the ‘basic skills’ needed for employment somewhere within ten miles of what they trained in. Note: by training I don’t mean literature, or economics, or whatever, but in reference to the core skills that PhDs are meant to develop: research, analysis, and whatever ‘fungible’ skills were developed in the PhD (e.g. discourse analysis, policy analysis, stats, etc).

Grad school is a terrific place to be. It’s intellectually stimulating and one of the most pleasant places to be while living close to – or well below – the poverty line. But the thing is, a lot of us are still at or below that line. The absence of tenure track positions, depreciation of pay in many universities for RA/TA and sessional work, and university’s failure to provide meaningful career counselling and training are significantly damaging the academy. And, what’s saddest, is I don’t really think the universities (or most faculty) give a damn because they can externalize or ignore most of these challenges and problems facing PhD students and candidates.

Is the state of the world in academe terminal? No, not necessarily. It’s entirely possible that things could be healed. But, at the same time, if I want to complete my degree in a timely basis (funding runs out!) and mitigate the accumulation of huge amounts of debt and do all the professional development things I need to do in my own time, I’m not going to be a hardcore activist on campus that tries to reshape academe. I appreciate the sentiment, but I think I have more effect changing politics outside the University that inside, and I’d rather spend my time working in a domain where change is more plausible. And, given that I’ll be thrust outside of the academe soon enough anyways, at least the stuff I do ‘outside’ provides a marketable set of ‘real work’ skills.

Tower of Sleep: You’re Fucked, and You’re Probably to Blame.