David Coady on the Need for an ‘Applied Epistemology’

David Coady‘s new book What To Believe Now: Applying Epistemology To Contemporary Issues (Blackwell, 2012)–by making vividly clear the importance and the significance of epistemology to politics and political life–may well be the most important and interesting book on epistemology in recent years; anyone interested in the control of the flows of information, their influence on our politics, and the role of normative models of reasoning and knowledge acquisition in enforcing political ideology should read it. In particular, Coady’s analysis and writing–tightly argued, clear, and rigorous–reaches a fine rhetorical and polemical pitch in Chapters 4 (‘Rumors and Rumor Mongers’), 5 (‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorists’) and 6 (‘Blogosphere and Conventional Media’), which are described as ‘unified by two closely related themes, the importance of free public channels of communication and dangers of overcredulous deference to formal authority.’  That description should provide you with a hint of Coady’s unconventional take on the topics covered in these chapters; even if you aren’t an academic philosopher, you owe it to yourself to read them to have well-established preconceptions shaken up. (And to enjoy a  rather entertaining take-down of Cass Sunstein.)

Today, I’d like to provide a brief introduction to Coady’s book, and then, in the next few days and weeks, follow-up with some extended analysis of the chapters mentioned above.

In the preface, Coady says that while the study of ethics has been transformed in recent years ‘by addressing contemporary social and technological issues, the study of espistemology remains quite abstract and ahistorical.’ Such an underdevelopment and narrowing divorces the study of knowledge from the practical conduct of our lives. In particular, for us, situated at this point in time:

The information revolution and the knowledge economy have radically changed the way that we acquire knowledge and justify our beliefs. These changes have altered our epistemic landscape as surely as the sexual revolution and breakthroughs in reproductive technology have changed our moral landscape. The latter changes provided a good deal of the impetus for the applied turn in ethics, but the former changes have so far failed to result in a comparable turn in epistemology.

As Coady notes, to do applied epistemology will be to return to the ways in which epistemology was done in that period of philosophical history–the time of  ‘modern philosophy‘–which established it as a primary philosophical concern: David Hume‘s argument against belief in miracles was a blow struck against the idea of the Bible as a source of knowledge, a political move if there ever was one; John Locke‘s argument for religious tolerance was based ‘partly on the grounds that no government can be sure that the official religion is correct, which means that no government can be sure it is not persecuting the true religion;’ and John Stuart Mill argued, in particular relevance to our modern times, that ‘since no person has infallible access to the truth, we are most likely to converge on the truth in the course of debate sustained by laws protecting free speech.’

Belief and action are inseparably bound; politics is a form of action (most simplistically, putting political beliefs into motion). Citizens and philosophers alike have known and acted on these connections for as long as man has been a political animal. In recent times, political philosophy seems to have forgotten these considerations when it has come to providing critical analyses of the epistemological issues arising from developments such as the Iraq war. (Did we ever have good evidence for the existence of weapons of mass destruction?) Coady’s book should help set political philosophy back on track by making it pay closer attention to what should be a central aspect of its question-asking and answering.

Note: Examples and quotes drawn from ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-3.

The Walking Dead and the Puzzle of Cinematic Adaptations

In my recent post on The Walking Dead—in comparing the comic book series to the AMC television series–I said that I found the comic book more complex, more brutal, truer to the darkness of a post-apocalyptic world ruled by the dead and diseased. In saying this, it seemed to me that the filmmakers would have done better had they hewn closer to the comic’s story-lines and characters, thus capturing its zeitgeist by trying to display a greater literal fidelity to it.  In response, a friend said he preferred the show deviate from the comic book, as it already has, considerably, because he liked the idea of being surprised, of finding out anew what the show’s writers had done with it. I  take it that by this he also meant that he looked forward to the possibility of the show reinvigorating the comic book’s basic premises.  And thus, we found ourselves at the oldest of debates when it comes to cinematic adaptations: Should you-the writer–stay (with the original)–or should you go (by yourself)?

My friend is right, of course, that writers in charge of a cinematic adaptation have the blessed freedom to clear up confused storylines, eliminate weak characters, straighten out plots and all of the rest. Thus, in the case of The Walking Dead they have–besides the opportunity to exploit the medium’s possibilities to bring the animation to life–the chance to provide readers of the comic books with an entirely new experience. Conversely, they also have the chance to–pardon the French–fuck things up completely: they may introduce plot twists that make little sense, introduce not clarity but obfuscation to the show’s narrative, and make characters not stronger but considerably weaker and less interesting. (On the Internet Fan Planet of The Walking Dead, there is much dissatisfaction expressed about the characters on the show; I agree with some of those views.)

This leads me to suspect the show’s makers have backed away from a central fact about the comic series: To wit, it is  grim, very grim. Some of the conflict–of all stripes, not just the physical kind–and violence is, er, cartoonish, but a great deal is not, and bringing that frame by frame to the screen would have resulted in a show of almost unrelenting darkness. There is a grimness that must be faced up to if the post-apocalyptic world is to be reckoned with and translating the comic book closely to the screen would have been one way to have done it. I do not think it is an impossible task, and I do not think viewers would not have been able to deal with it. But the makers of the show seem to have decided–unfortunately, it must be said–to introduce more conventional characters and story-lines of conflict and resolution, in keeping with well-established television tropes, perhaps in the hope of keeping some of the grimness of the zombie-world at bay.

This does not mean that The Walking Dead is not a good television show; it still is. But comparing it to the comic book would be a mistake. The final word in these matters, to resolve the minor dilemma posed in the first paragraph above, is to treat these two cultural productions that happen to share the same name, as two entirely distinct entities, and to evaluate them accordingly.  A cop-out perhaps, but in these sorts of matters, it’s the only reasonable thing to do. (I wonder if this is a bit like comparing translated versions to originals?)

Studying Political Philosophy via Revolutions (Well, Three of Them)

Today, I’m going to think out loud about the syllabus I’m designing for the coming fall semester’s seminar on Political Philosophy. (I’m conducting this rumination in a public forum in the hope of helping me finalize this pesky business; please do chime in with suggestions, critiques, bouquets, brickbats etc.) My class will meet twice a week–two hundred-minute classroom sessions–count for four credits, and is roughly re-describable as ‘Classical and Contemporary Social and Political Philosophy.’ (This would clear things up considerably were it not for the fact that our department also offers Social Philosophy, which I’m told, is also redescribable as ‘Classical and Contemporary Social and Political Philosophy.’)

In the fall, I plan to center my class’ discussions and readings on political revolutions; to use the French, American and Haitian Revolutions to introduce and illustrate  many central questions of political philosophy: the nature of political power and the state, political resistance, the rights of citizens, the nature of citizenship, the legitimacy of legal regimes, the varieties of political unions, the nature of conservatism etc. The readings then, should be a mix of contemporary polemics and retrospective evaluation.

For the French Revolution, we’ll begin with Sieyes‘ What is the Third Estate, then read Edmund Burke‘s classic, Reflections on The Revolution in France, followed by some yet-to-settled-on excerpts from Michael Walzer‘s Regicide and Revolution and Tocqueville‘s Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, and close with Maistre‘s Considerations on France. I will probably include: some material by Robespierre and William Doyle’s A Very Short History (to start things off).

For the American Revolution, we will probably begin with excerpts from Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters before reading Thomas Paine‘s The Rights of Man and Common Sense. (A new Verso edition that collects these two looks promising.) Then we’ll read some of The Federalist Papers. The current list includes 1-3, 9-10, 14-15; time permitting: 22-23, 26-27, 37, 39, 47-48; and then 84, 78, 70, 39, 51.

Having read a bit about the French and American Revolutions, we will read Hannah Arendt‘s On Revolution before moving on to the Haitian Revolution. As historical background, we’ll read CLR James‘ Black Jacobins. (I’m also considering Laurent Dubois’ Avengers of the New World.) For theoretical assessments, we’ll read excerpts from Nick Nesbitt’s Universal Emancipation (I’m inclined to think the Nesbitt’s writing is likely to present a challenge to many of my students) and Susan Buck-Morss‘ Hegel and Haiti. (I’ve just been pointed to Aristide’s edited collection of Toussaint L’ouverture‘s writings, collected in The Haitian Revolution (Verso) and will probably include selections from there.)

So: This isn’t a perfect syllabus by any means. There is possibly too much reading–but I had to leave so much out!–and too little balance. But I think it does well in providing a historically situated debate on most of the central questions of political philosophy. The writing is accessible; indeed, there are a few stylists in there (Burke,Paine, the Federalist Papers etc) so the reading assignments should be quite enjoyable. Most of the pieces are provocative with a few that have real polemical bite.

It should make for an entertaining fourteen weeks.

Tennis, IBM’s Data Tracker, and the Hidden Order of Things

If it’s the first–or sometimes, the second–weekend in July, it’s time for Wimbledon brunch–or breakfast. Today, I hosted a few friends to partake of the pleasures of the 2012 finals.  Among them, Roger Federer’s biggest fan, one whose fanhood makes for very interesting watching from up close. I have watched many tennis matches with her in the past five years, and am always struck by her involvement, her anxious following of her favorite, an anxiety compounded and made worse by a tennis match’s fluctuations and the ebbs and flows of its dramatic resolution. It’s been a long time since any sports encounter has done that to me but I remain susceptible under the right sorts of circumstances and thus, sympathetic to her trials and travails. (During the epic Federer-Nadal 2008 final, as it moved into a fifth set and into another cluster of deuces, she had simply stopped watching the television and started doing the dishes instead: the tension had grown to be too much for her. I knew from past experience exactly what she was feeling: a tightening of the gut, a nausea whose phenomenology is distinctive.)

Today, as Andy Murray won the first set, and Roger Federer began his comeback in the second set, I was introduced to a newer palliative for her anxiety. The mundane, domestic, hands-on relief of dishwashing was exchanged for tracking, er, the IBM Data Tracker, which, well let me just let IBM’s marketing folks do the talking from here on:

IBM has mined more than seven years of Grand Slam Tennis data (approximately 39 million data points) to determine patterns and styles for players when they win. This insight is applied to determine the “keys” to the match for each player in a match.

  • Prior to each match, the system runs an analysis of both competitors’ historical head-to-head match ups as well as stats against comparable player styles, to determine what the data indicates each player must do to do well in the match (SPSS technology)
  • The system then selects the 3 most significant keys for each player in the match
  • The Keys to the Match dashboard updates in real-time with current game statistics as the match unfolds

So, at any given moment, the Tracker displays how well the player in question is doing in terms of the ‘three most significant keys:’ conformance with the required value of the key indicates the player is headed for a win (roughly).  Thus, then, the reassuring power of the IBM Data Tracker for the bundle-of-nerves fan, wondering whether the 0bject of her attention, her vicarious desires, is performing as he should in order to win. The Data Tracker dips beneath the contingent unpredictable flux, to reach into the hidden order of things and reveal a glorious stability, a movement along a data line that indicates progress, and hopefully, inevitable movement towards the desired endpoint. The analytic grants us the security, that despite all the seeming variance of the surface, the chaos of the visible, there lurks the reassuring solidity of the conforming data point.

The ancient motivation for the statistic, made so starkly manifest in providing therapeutic relief to the sports fan.

The Walking Dead Claim Another Victim

I have finally succumbed to The Walking Dead. As I had noted in a post earlier this week, I am ensconced in a friend’s apartment, house-sitting, with access to–among other things–an impressive collection of graphic novels. Included in them is the first compendium of The Walking Dead comic book series (Compendium One, May 6, 2009, issues 1-48), which I’ve worked through. I’ve also immersed myself in the AMC television series, watched the six episodes of the first season and am five episodes deep into the second; as you can see, I’ve been spending my time well. (I’m not a serious consumer of comic books so this represents a change in my reading habits and an investment in time. It has not been one I’ve regretted in the least.)

Obligatory show-comic comparison: the novel is starker, darker, more complex, but the show has its own strengths in creating and sustaining  moments of chilling horror and in the development of interesting characters and story-lines.

So, post-apocalyptic horror, eh? What is it good for? Well, the taglines at the back of the Compendium say it quite well:

How many hours are in a day when you don’t spend half of them watching television? When is the last time any of us REALLY worked to get something we wanted? How long has it been since any of us really NEEDED something that we wanted?

The world we knew is gone.

The world of comfort and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months society has crumbled, no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV.

In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.

And living, really, when you get down to it, is a series of hard choices that need to be made. Portraying the making of those choices, in a world whose most distinctive characteristic is the corrosive proximity of death, disease,  and danger, is what gives both the comic books and the television series their gravity.  There is violence aplenty, but it is not what gives The Walking Dead its air of dread. That has been accomplished, quite well, by ensuring the world inhabited by Rick Grimes and his family is one whose relentless demands can produce in a parent the otherwise unthinkable thought that it might be better for an injured child to succumb  than to recover into a world made anew like this one. It’s  the visceral thought of a world like that is the fear that animates The Walking Dead.

For philosophy professors looking for pop culture material to illustrate reading lists: the show and the novel both bristle with segments that could be drawn into classroom discussions of states of nature, libertarian philosophy, ethical dilemmas, philosophy of technology, feminism, race relations and so on.

Note: I intend to write a follow-up post on the show’s treatment of sexuality.

Richard Epstein’s Overdetermined Critique of the Roberts Ruling

Richard Epstein offers an interesting critique–based on the alleged inseparability of the power to regulate commerce and the power to tax–of John Roberts’ ruling in the ACA case. If it’s not an activity the government can regulate, then it’s not something the government can tax either. Thus, Justice Roberts should have struck down the individual mandate:

As a matter of constitutional text, legal history and logic, the power to regulate commerce and the power to tax should not be separated. It is not good for the court or the country that the chief justice’s position in such an important case is confused at its core.

Epstein finds ample precedent for his understanding of the inseparability of the power to regulate and the power to tax:

In the Child Labor Tax case of 1922, the Supreme Court refused to uphold a tax equal to 10 percent of the net profits of any firm that shipped goods into interstate commerce if the firm used child labor anywhere in its plants. Chief Justice William Howard Taft noted that…Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) forbade Congress to use its commerce power to prohibit outright the shipment of ordinary goods across state lines because they were made in factories that used child labor. A heavy tax…could not be used to mount an end run around this constitutional obstacle to its own power.

The same point was reinforced in 1936 in United States v. Butler, which struck down a tax on agricultural commodities because it sought to achieve the then unconstitutional regulatory aim of reducing the total acreage in agricultural production. After the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, when the Commerce Clause was held to permit such regulation, the tax became just as permissible as direct regulation. Wickard expanded the scope of federal power, but it did nothing to upset the constitutional parity between the taxing and commerce powers.

So Epstein only needs the inseparability doctrine for his argument to work. For having found the activity in question–non-participation in the healthcare market–was not something the government could regulate via the Commerce clause, then it failed to be an activity the government could tax either.

But Epstein seems to also think that the tax argument fails on its own merits. For he offers us an ‘originalist’ reading of the relevant Constitutional clause:

By giving Congress independent powers over taxation and other revenue sources, the Constitution ended that dependency. But as a quid pro quo, the Constitution also restricted the use of these revenues to classical public goods — benefits that must be given to all citizens, if given to any — like paying off national debts and paying for the nation’s defense. General welfare, mentioned in parallel with these two phrases, is best read as covering only matters that advance the welfare of the United States as a whole. The redistribution of income, or “transfer payments” among citizens, like those mandated under the Affordable Care Act, doesn’t qualify for taxation in this originalist reading of the Constitution.

This is a curious business now. Remember, this supposedly optimal reading is not required for Epstein’s argument to work. It does however, let him deploy some additional ideological machinery.  It suggests that ‘healthcare’ is not a ‘classical public good’ like the payment of national debts or the budgetary requirements of national defense.  It suggests that ‘healthcare’ cannot thus, be understood as ‘general welfare,’ which rather is to be understood in more abstract terms as that which might benefit the nation–but presumably, not its people–‘as a whole.’ (Note that provisions for healthcare are defined as ‘redistribution of income’–the horror!)

The real problem, it emerges, is not the separation of the powers to regulate and tax for which, in fact, there is a great deal of precedent; witness, for instance, the greater reliance on taxation, as opposed to direct regulation, of alcohol and tobacco consumption. The substantive issue for Epstein is that Roberts has suggested that ‘healthcare’ might have something to do with ‘public goods,’ with ‘general welfare.’ In short, it might be a business that government could concern itself with.

Georg Simmel on Sociologically Positive Conflict and Urban Life

A quiet span of days with a national holiday mid-week, rare access to expansive living spaces, no subway riding. So, by virtue of having occupied a ‘retreat-like’ space and by taking a step back from the madding crowd, back to a slower pace, there is time to reflect on the space-living-crowds bargain that New York City exacts from its denizens.

Some useful thoughts on that theme may be found in Georg Simmel‘s theory of conflict as an integrative force in groups:

[The opposition of one individual element to another in the same association is by no means merely a negative social factor, but it is in many ways the only means through which coexistence with individuals intolerable in themselves could be possible. If we had not power and right to oppose tyranny and obstinacy, caprice and tactlessness, we could not endure relations with people who betray such characteristics. We should be driven to deeds of desperation which would put the relationships to an end. This follows not alone for the self-evident reason…that such disagreeable circumstances tend to become intensified if they are endured quietly and without protest; but, more than this, opposition affords us a subjective satisfaction, diversion, relief, just as under other psychological conditions…the same results are brought about by humility and patience. Our opposition gives us the feeling that we are not completely crushed in the relationship. It permits us to preserve a consciousness of energy, and thus lends a vitality and a reciprocity to relationships from which, without this corrective, we should have extricated ourselves at any price….

[O]pposition is an integrating component of the relationship itself….Opposition is not merely a means of conserving the total relationship, but it is one of the concrete functions in which the relationship in reality consists. In case the relationships are purely external, and consequently do not reach deeply into the practical, the latent form of conflict discharges this service: i. e., aversion, the feeling of reciprocal alienation and repulsion, which in the moment of a more intimate contact of any sort is at once transformed into positive hatred and conflict.

Without this aversion life in a great city, which daily brings each into contact with countless others, would have no thinkable form. The whole internal organization of this commerce rests on an extremely complicated gradation of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of the most transient or most permanent sort. The sphere of indifference is in all this relatively restricted. The activity of our minds responds to almost every impression s received from other people in some sort of a definite feeling, all the unconsciousness, transience, and variability of which seems to remain only in the form of a certain indifference. In fact, this latter would be as unnatural for us as it would be intolerable to be swamped under a multitude of suggestions among which we have no choice. Antipathy protects us against these two typical dangers of the great city. It is the initial stage of practical antagonism. It produces the distances and the buffers without which this kind of life could not be led at all. The mass and the mixtures of this life, the forms in which it is carried on, the rhythm of its rise and fall—these unite with the unifying motives, in the narrower sense, to give to a great city the character of an indissoluble whole. Whatever in this whole seems to be an element of division is thus in reality only one of its elementary forms of socialization.

Ref: Georg Simmel. “The Sociology of Conflict: I” American Journal of Sociology 9 (1903): 490-525

A Tale of Two Independence Days

Today is July 4th, Independence Day in the USA. That is some forty-one days distant from another Independence Day, August 15th, which will be celebrated in India. I have not ‘celebrated’ August 15th for many years. It meant there was a political speech being telecast live; prime ministers spoke of national achievement and sacrifice; I tuned out. It meant the national television channel would show documentaries on ‘freedom fighters,’ men and women whose service to the ‘nation’ always put  mine to shame. It meant I would be reminded, yet again, of the words of a stirring speech by the most un-Indian Indian to ever be Prime Minister. I never saluted a flag, never sang the anthem on August 15th. (I sang it on many other occasions, always standing to attention when it played.) The ‘freedom struggle,’ despite the best efforts of history books, national broadcasting systems, and political parties, remained a dim portion of the past I shared with my ‘fellow citizens.’ I knew about, and vaguely sensed, Independence Day, but it passed me by every year, without fail.

I never failed to find Nehru’s speech moving though. And I never failed to appreciate the day off from school.

On August 15th, 1987, I caught a flight to New York via London and left ‘home.’ I cracked the expected joke for anyone that cared to listen and humour me: I was free at last, gone over the black water, over the oceans. On December 1st, 2000, in down-town Manhattan. I took the citizenship oath for my newly adopted nation. There were many others present that day, a veritable United Nations of origins, saying the magic words out loud. Then, my American passport handy, I flew off, to another land, elsewhere, Australia, to live and work there for  two more years. I was very confused about nationality but I was not confused about travel documents. I needed them; some of them made life way more convenient, they meant easy passage through airports, friendlier customs and immigration officials the world over. Getting a visa to go to India felt like a small price to pay for that convenience.

So now, Independence Day comes six weeks earlier, with a bigger number attached to it. (Sixty-five back in India, two hundred and thirty-six here.) I live in New York, in Brooklyn. I teach American pragmatism, Dewey in New York City. This is a less sober holiday, more of an open invitation to hedonism. There’s more beef being cooked,  for one thing. (I will celebrate July 4th, in all probability, as I have for many years now, by attending a barbecue.) There are fewer reminders of freedom fighters, but more flags are visible.  I still don’t salute a flag, I still don’t sing the national anthem. (I stand to attention for the Star Spangled Banner in sports stadiums but don’t place my hand over my heart.) The English are still dastardly, that much hasn’t changed. (There is a greater fascination with the Royal Family though.)

And I still appreciate the day off. Nations are  good for holidays at least, a small compensation for their otherwise immense burdens.

Traveling Away from Distraction and Fast Clocks

I am writing from a new location today. I still have book shelves as companions, but their contents are interestingly different. (An impressive collection of graphic novels and lots of medieval history of science for instance.)  The computer runs a different browser (Firefox, not Chrome) and the Pandora station is playing bluegrass, which I have to admit, doesn’t get much airtime on my usual machine. The monitor and keyboard’s geometries are novel.  When I look up from my writing position, just below street level on a row of beautiful Brooklyn brownstones, I see plants and people (at home I look up at a wall, and left out of a window); cats, not mine–the same ones that woke me a few times last night when they jumped on to my bed–wail away, not too loudly mind, in the background.

That last bit should have solved any mystery pertaining to my transplantation: I’m house-sitting, doing  friends a favour, and scoring myself a staycation, for this residency includes access to what must surely be one of Brooklyn’s most sumptuous backyard gardens. My assignments for the week are simple: keep the three cats well fed and at peace with each other; water the garden systematically and thoroughly; don’t break anything.

Writing this blog post from here allows me to combine two threads of earlier conversations: sites of distraction and the slowing of clocks by travel. The latter first. Here, in my new abode, I’ve slowly discovered its particular accommodations, its boundaries and contours, come to grips with its creaks and groans. (And all that was just to figure out where the cats were and to make coffee this morning; getting Netflix to work last night, on the other hand, was a cinch.) I’ve been to this house many times before; indeed, I’ve been visiting this address since 1995, but with my usual hosts away, it feels new all over again. This novelty, this nascent unfamiliarity, has ensured that my day today feels more languid, more open-ended. It is this open-endedness too, that promises relief from distraction, which very often is manifest in a series of bad habits developed with regards to a particular space. Perhaps I will find distraction and procrastination here as well, but for the time being, marvelling at the two windows on either side of my desk, the dappled sunlight dramatically playing with its detritus, it still holds promise as a location unsullied by lassitude and dissolution.

I intend to seek out new sites for writing all week; sometimes in the backyard garden; sometimes on the table in the kitchen upstairs. In conducting such searches I join the legions of those who up and move their headquarters, laptops and chargers included, to coffee shops, to libraries, to summer retreats by lakes and shores. My strategy falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of possibilities; a simple change of residence but elaborate enough to count as a ‘retreat.’ That word affords the most appropriate description, one capable of doing double duty as ‘manoeuvre’ and ‘location.’ The clocks will speed up soon enough; I will go back to being scatterbrained. But for now, there is possibility and promise. (The Pandora station has moved on to Amy Winehouse and Black Sabbath.)

Bill Keller and Some Elementary Confusions About Technology and Privacy

Bill Keller argues for a national identification card, urging Americans to ‘get over’ their fears about its abuse:

You might start with the Social Security card. You would issue a plastic version, and in it you would embed a chip containing biometric information: a fingerprint, an eye scan or a digital photo. The employer would swipe the card and match it to the real you. Unlike your present Social Security card, the new version would be useless to a thief because it would contain your unique identifier. The information would not need to go into a database….This will not satisfy those who fear that any such mandate is potentially “a tool for social control,” as Chris Calabrese of the A.C.L.U. put it. But the only way to completely eliminate the risks of a connected world is to burn your documents, throw away your cellphone, cancel your Internet service and live off the grid.

Er. First, ‘the information would not need to go into a database’ does not mean the information will not go into a database. On this matter, I’d defer to the man quoted by Keller himself, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who points out that,

The one thing we know with certainty about databases is that they grow….[The official urge to amass and use information] takes on a life of its own.

When storage is cheap and ubiquitous, and so is data collection and analysis, searchable, analyzable data banks are an obvious consequence. These databases, whose primary outputs are analytical reports, then lend themselves to precisely the clumsy, pernicious, ‘social control’ worried about by their opponents.

Second, Keller slides all too quickly into ‘the only way to completely eliminate the risks of a connected world.’ But who ever said anything about completely eliminating those risks? Thus, the fallacy of the false dichotomy raises its head again, as it does all too often in debates about technology’s ambiguous blessings. The general format of these disputes is as follows. In response to the claim that ‘Technology X has possible problematic outcome Y,’ our interlocutor supplies ‘Good luck trying to live without technology today.’  Bingo. You’re an impractical Luddite.

There is another rhetorical template visible in Keller’s piece: the incomplete noting of the ambivalent attitude that most people appear to have toward their privacy:

But on the subject of privacy, we are an ambivalent nation. Americans — especially younger Americans, who swim in a sea of shared information — are casual to the point of recklessness about what we put online.

So in response to the claim that ‘privacy should be protected in domain X‘ our interlocutor says ‘But look at Facebook!’ The problem, of course, is that Facebook is a space designed in its interface and its user affordances to encourage and facilitate privacy-destructive behavior. Exhibit Numero Uno: the Wall, which lets users make their formerly private emails public.

It’s going to take better arguments than the ones offered by Keller to diminish the CQ–the Creepiness Quotient–of national identification cards.