Technovana

The most striking feature of living and working in Silicon Valley is the extreme contrast between technology and nature. On campus, I am surrounded by towering redwood trees and verdant hillsides. As my eyes trace serpentine trails in the distance, the click-whir of an electric car startles me from my reverie. The sheet metal giant who shares the view with me is unmoved by such noises, continuing his silent meditation as I navigate between his feet. The air hums with connection, thick with the invisible media of 21st Century communication. The transition from garden to workstation does not jar the senses as it might in a less cared-for space. The glass walls leave the room open to the wild, filling my eyes with trees and sunshine. Ephemeralization of devices enables attending to work, ears filled with the murmur of winding water. The utopic vision made evident here is healing, a restorative against the bare concrete freeways and the cacophony of cars, malls, and music that make up m...

Anyone who majors in the humanities has had to endure a version of that question more than once. As I went through graduate school, people asked the question less and less. By the time I was teaching classes, I had a pretty ready answer (teaching is paying work, you know?). As a professor, the question answers itself. Of course, being a philosophy professor is not for everybody. The crowded academic job market alone is enough to dissuade the faint of heart. The work is demanding, involving wearing the hats of instructor, researcher, and administrator. To succeed, one has to be flexible, creative, think on one's feet, and be ready to ask hard questions of oneself and of others. As academic institutions rely on more part-time and temporary staff, success often translates into more work without longer-term commitment from the organization. One can invest a whole lot of time and energy without knowing whether that organization will continue to provide support. Living the life of a ...

In teaching ethics, and in paying too much attention to politics, I encounter the sentiment that "We've always had [insert great misfortune], so we'll never be without it" over and over again. The sentiment is offered as a reason not to work toward alleviating poverty, warfare, disease, and all manner of problems that simply affect the whole globe and likely look to big to overcome. Still, I think this is a problematic line of reasoning, and one that we should stamp out as if it were a logical fallacy (and might trade on one, more below). Ok, so why is it a problem? For one, it's simply conversation-stopping in any ethical debate. Should we devote resources to researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? Well, babies have always died for no reason, so we'll never prevent that... There is simply nothing to do but throw one's hands in the air and give up. Now, in ethics, there is some reason to take this argument seriously. There is a very general principle...

Yesterday the European Court of Justice issued an important ruling that has the tech policy world buzzing about privacy, search engines and personal history. In short, the court ruled that the EU Data Protection Directive gives a person the right to demand that old information be purged from search results. The particular case involves an attorney seeking removal of links to announcements about a real-estate auction connected with a debt settlement in 1998. While the ECJ made a number of interesting moves in the case (including a welcome argument that the distinction between data processors and data controllers does not make as much sense today as it did in 1995 when the Directive went into effect), the big consequence everyone is talking is the right to be forgotten. The long memory of the Internet is a feature it's hard not to love and fear at the same time. Whether you have something to hide or not, if it's on the Internet, it stays on the Internet (most of the time, at l...

For the most part, autocorrect is a useful tool for avoiding spelling mistakes. Sometimes, it feels more like a very subtle tool for censorship, and that really passes me off. Swearing is not always the last resort of the unskilled communicator. In the right hands, it can be a dam good way to express frustration or even righteous indignation. If I want to communicate my emotional state more than any semantic content, a good round of cursing just does the ducking trick. Unfortunately, autocorrect developers must keep in mind that parents will get upset if their computer teaches their kids to swear, so I understand the rationale. Still, I would appreciate being treated like an adult and having an effective "suggest offensive words" option. I've seen such options, but they work like add, and when I'm trying to send a quick message that contains a swear, I don't want to type out the entire word or phrase like an assume. In short, autocorrect, I don't want to live ...

There are no good writing days or bad writing days. There are only days where there is writing and days where there is no writing. Recently, my main professional ambition is to minimize the latter, preferably limiting them to weekends and the occasional holiday. The imperative originated in a concern to pick up the pace on my research and to meet a submission deadline on a promising call for papers. I'm glad to say that I made the deadline and decided to use the momentum to send out some projects that have been lying fallow for a couple of months. I went from having nothing significant in submission to having three articles in submission in the course of four days. Three submissions, four days. Beyond those submissions, I started on another three projects, some now in draft, some still in extended abstract. Now that I have the back-burner projects out of the way, I can start some revision and further research on the current projects, and hopefully get those off sometime soon as w...

Today, I told my students that while Socrates was not the first philosopher, he is the one who really set what would come to be called Western Philosophy in motion. I don't know exactly how accurate that view is since there were a number of odd mystery cults circulated in the Mediterranean, Pythagoras and his crew for instance. Nevertheless, there is something about the drama of the trial and death of Socrates that seemed to energize the philosophical project, such as it was at the time. Even if created in retrospect, the narrative of a person dying for asking questions sends a powerful signal that there is something important about what he was doing. Remember that it's not quite right to say that Socrates died for his ideas. The early dialogues offer little in the way of a positive project, and what is there is usually attributed to Plato working out the early stages of his project. In the end, Socrates is executed because asking questions is dangerous. It undermines the str...