Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

My friend Sherm posted his top 20 list under the auspices of the exercise described below to Facebook and tagged me to respond. (No, I won’t include his. That’s his decision to make)

Normally these viral “post your yadda yadda” things drive me bat#$%^ but, typical of Sherm, he posited an exercise interesting enough that I responded. It’s important that it’s not the “Desert Island” list because that one just doesn’t work for me. Though, obviously, there’d be huge overlap from this list to whatever too-damned-short-a-list I had to come up with to take to the proverbial desert island.

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– Begin Cross Post – (Numbers changed to bullets because it’s supposed to be an unordered list)

(Sorry folks, I don’t do the ‘tag your friends’ thing. Sherm and somebody else asked me to do this and the exercise struck me interesting. This took 8 minutes. Then I decided to remove some duplicates from the same artist. Another 10 minutes. I’d probably pick 80% of these if forced to redo the exercise again. Which would drop and which would add, I can’t predict. In redoing, I’d guess 80% would stay again and probably not the same 80%.)

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it.  List 20 albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you.  20 albums that “changed your life.”  List the first 20 that come to mind in 20 minutes.  Tag 20 friends, including me, because I am interested in seeing what my friends choose.  To do this, go to the Notes heading on the left column of the Home page, paste the rules in a new note, list your 20 picks, and tag 20 friends.

In no particular order:

• The Dark – Artsy Annoyance/Boring Contrivance (Actually an untitled tape that has a storied history with other Dark on it as well)
• Peter Garbriel – 3
• Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine
• Robert Palmer – Clues
• Kraftwerk – Computer World
• The Silencers – A Letter From St. Paul
• Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
• Led Zeppelin – IV
• The Beatles – Rubber Soul
• The Clash – Sandinista!
• Machines of Loving Grace – Concentration
• David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
• The Crystal Method – Vegas
• Big Catholic Guilt – Possession
• John Lennon – Shaved Fish
• Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
• Gary Numan – The Pleasure Principle
• O- Positive - Only Breathing/Cloud Factory (It’s one Disc so ;-P~
• Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge over Troubled Water
• Oingo Boingo – Good For Your Soul

Those of you who were ON some of these records and are reading this, don’t let it go to your heads…. and don’t doubt for a second doubt that, standing apart from my knowing you, the music rates.

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– End Cross Post –

As I was setting up this blog on a v-host at DreamHost and under my personal domain, I posted the following to my Facebook page: “Ok, money where my mouth is. Content updates to Facebook will be essentially ending soon. Future status updates will point to a blog on a server I control. Time to begin the exit. If anyone wants a discount codes at DreamHost, let me know. Yes, I know it will be inconvenient to have to leave Facebook to comment and use real email to message me etc. Sorry about that but the Facebook thing is pretty seriously bad news.”

Tim H., ever the provocateur asked me why so, here it is,  the first proper blog post and  what will likely be many on the subject of Facebook and other social networking sites and the issues with them.

First, a little background.

For years I have been saying I find social networking sites deeply problematic and think, ultimately, they are bad for the culture and individual rights of freedom and privacy. I’ve been saying it so long that Friendster was cool when I let fly my first rant on the topic.

The core issues are all rooted in the disconnect between the interests of the companies that run these sites and the interests of their users.

On a basic level, the operators of the site want to make money from your contacts and your relationships. Even if the account and the use of the site is free, the goal, of course, is to make money from what you post and what they can data mine about you and the people you know. Usually, the results of this data mining are as ‘benign’ is being able to target advertising at you but it can also be exploited for more overtly nefarious purposes. One more nefarious purpose is to make money selling advertising to viewers of your content you don’t get paid for. It’s that mining and the need of the site owners to lock you into their network that creates the problems and why, really, we need better alternatives for ‘social networking’ and managing our presence on the ‘net.

Now, at first, all this may seem like a fair trade. They give you an easy way to establish a presence on the internet, tools to connect you to your ‘friends’ and a kind of address to tell people in meatspace where to find you to stay in contact. For musicians, the membership of a social network has become perceived as an audience, all neatly packaged, an artist can market to and, in truth, there have been significant success stories for bands using MySpace and Facebook in just that way.

All that appears, on the surface, to be a nice thing to give you in exchange for showing you a few ads. For millions of people, it has been. Being honest about my Facebook experience, it’s had some very positive effects for me:

• I have reconnected with some people I am actually very fond of but with whom had slipped out of touch.
• I have actually met new people based on shared interests. This, in many ways shocks me and will probably be the topic of another post.
• I was able to help promote an event that was important to me. The reunion show of a band I used to work with doing stage lighting and some management; Big Catholic Guilt which was, in truth, the only reason I joined ‘the Facebook’ in the first place.
• I have enjoyed the ‘Pub’ experience. The conversational engagement that the interfaces of these systems can afford. The truly ‘social’ aspects of the network.

Despite all these very real benefits, Facebook has also come at a significant price to me.

• I have, because I needed to promote the show, accepted ‘friending’ from people who I am uneasy about having be associated with my online face. It’s not that I think they are bad people. I am very fond of some of them and love being in touch with them. It’s not even that I don’t respect them. Really, it’s that they have made choices about how they present themselves that I don’t agree with. Often it’s a courageousness about not being politically correct that exceeds even mine. Sometimes it’s that I know they’re kidding but a third party would likely blanche.
• It has put me in some emotional binds. There have been people who I actually rather like who are part of a community I prefer to distance myself from whose ‘friendings’ I have had to avoid because I didn’t want to surface as one of their friends and expose myself to the rest of those communities. Such exposure happens here on a public blog, of course, but there’s no public record of who reads this. And, more important, I don’t get put into some mechanized interpretation of a ‘social graph’ that implies somebody’s interest in me maps one-to-one with my interest in them.
• It has put me under social pressures I haven’t liked. Pressure to post pictures of myself online. Pressure not to ‘untag’ myself in pictures others have posted of me. Pressures to accept ‘friending’ from people I don’t actively dislike but who, really, aren’t folks I have an emotional connection to and don’t want to establish one with.
• Engaging actively on Facebook has been a time-sink and a, from a long term ‘net presence’ perspective, a negative one. I, knowing most of what I post here going in, chose to make my presence on Facebook personal and individual. I lied about my high school, college and work affiliations in my profile with little clues to people who really know me that, yes, it was me they found hiding behind the locked down profile and obfuscated profile picture. Because of this, I invested time posting things there that don’t accrue to my public internet presence and reputation. It was, from a professional perspective, a bad use of my time.

Then there are the practical problems.

• I can’t get the data back out. When, and I do say when, Facebook fades from favor and the next site becomes all the rage, all the records of my interactions. Any content I posted is all locked away in Facebook subject, at best, to manual capture. The owners of these sites have no incentive at all to help you pull out your contact, connections or dialog and move it elsewhere. Their business depends on keeping and controlling what you post.
• Their business model is inherently predisposed to encourage you to take risks with your privacy and, to me, much worse, the privacy of others. Facebook games, hacks, and a legacy of privacy-breaching rollouts of new features are surely bad enough but to me, the most troubling experience I had on Facebook was when I posted about my horror at the contact upload feature: “Find People You Email”
• The systems in place simultaneously encourage you to share personal information and deprive you of granular control. Sure, this blog is completely public and, therefore, affords me no useful ‘blocking’ protection but it also is quite obviously so. I am not lulled into any false sense of security that only my ‘friends’ can see it.
• My use of their service and how much of my information is exposed is entirely subject to their whims. If I offend, I can be banned. Not via some formalized legal process but at their sole discretion. If they fold, sell or substantially alter the service, my investment in the network could be instantly eradicated.

The “Find People You Email” feature mentioned above is particularly insidious. It’s designed to make it easy for you to connect with your ‘meatspace’ friends on Facebook. You point Facebook at a contact file or email account and Facebook scrapes the names and makes suggestions for you to connect with them in the Facebook environment. It’s extremely convenient and easy and it’s deeply, deeply insidious because of that very ease. A person I have enormous professional respect for actual bristled at my post about how horrified I was that Facebook claimed people I know had not used this feature had used it to find me. I, with a certain brutal frankness, posted that, in my probably insufficiently humble opinion, thought you’d have to be a real bozo to do this. He, this colleague, posted that he had and that I was being an alarmist. Despite my sincere respect for him, here’s why I believe he was dangerously wrong:

My contacts files include information about how to reach people in the technology business and in the press who are, being honest, ‘famous people’ by some narrow and hardly worth name-dropping about definition. They are engineers at companies who normally let you talk to marketing people. They are niche press. They include the personal contact into for technical support or beta coordinating staff. The email addresses and phone numbers I have aren’t always the same ones that exist on their business cards. The mobile numbers are to their mobiles. Not just the mobile they turn off on the weekends. The way good contact management software works, the one contact may have several email addresses and phone numbers associated with one name. It has been made very clear to me by these people that I have the ‘special number’ or the ‘special email’ because they trust me. It’s my responsibility to respect that trust and not go handing these addresses to Facebook, an entity designed to profit from surfacing connections.

In a discussion about privacy, another friend pointed out the pitfalls of location API’s and other privacy risks more directly impacting physical safety in meatspace and they will be the topic of future posts but he, surprisingly, didn’t see the concern I had about email addresses as substantial. While I respect his choices not to be protective of his email address, there have been times in my professional life that I have had to field hundreds of emails a day (him too actually) and the commingling of personal and business email and the exposure to spam were real impediments to my productivity. The volume of email and the effort necessary to manage it cost me, and my employers, real money. The issue was severe enough I have had to abandon several primary email addresses over the years. Those of you who have my ‘real’ email address know you do and I rely on you not to share or compromise it.

We’re at nearly 1900 words and it’s time to wrap this post. There are countless other issues with ‘social networking’ sites and, of course, there will be more privacy breaches by Facebook to hammer on later. This, I hope, has at least been food for thought.

Oh, and one last thought about trust. Comments here require you to register. I’ll leave up any comment that meaningfully contributes to the dialog and, of course, I will have a log of your IP address, browser, platform and where you followed the link from; standard server logs. With some effort, if you register, I could correlate that info with the email address you used to register and the user name you choose. It’s your call whether or not to trust me as much as you trust Facebook, or not. Bonus points to anyone who can cite the best reasons not to trust me where it might actually be safer to trust Facebook and no, this isn’t a call for wisecrackery. It’s a real ‘are you thinking this all through?’ question with real and logical answers I will post if folks show interest. There are more than a few deliberate hints in this article.

– Jon

A personal blog, really any publication to the internet, sticks to you like tar on your shoe. In this reality there are both opportunities and perils.

In beginning work on this blog, I am forced to face some hard realities. If I’m effective at this, I will expose what I believe and how I think on a personal level in a very public way that may have consequences for my future in some contexts.

I had a ‘blog’ before they were called ‘blogs’. It had a series of essays some of which presaged, for example, the wisdom of a direct to customer retail strategy for Apple. Some of which predicted, for example, concepts of media accessibility and the challenges of copyright to innovation. (I wasn’t hip to patents then to the extent I am now.) Then, I basically went silent.

Eyes wide open decisions about what one posts on the internet are vital to having opportunities and to being able to hold your head high. Not everything I post here will be agreeable to all potential clients or employers and I must be aware of, and accept, the risks.

Over the last few months, I realized how much I was self-editing, even now, about how public I could be about my opinions regarding, for example, Patent Reform, Antennagate, the ACTA treaty, and the licensing encumbrances that could jeopardize public use video on the web. I have been guarded about what I see as anti-user behavior by some software and content companies. I have been reticent to express, in public contexts, how I feel about the way religion, patriotism or even party loyalty is being used to corrupt human rights and personal freedom in the current political climate. Then I realized something…

For twelve years while working at my former employer, I was extremely careful about what I said in any public forum. I always had in mind that my work there did include editorial responsibilities in both overt and indirect ways. I spoke at QuickTIme Live! several times, once even in a keynote. I was a conference speaker at Macworld Expo more times than I can remember, at NAB and a W3C Plenary session and other less publicly visible fora in all of these events, I was very, very careful. I used to say when asked certain questions after or during these presentations, sometimes presentations to, literally, more than a thousand people; “Well, I work for Big Bird so, I can’t really comment on that.” and I said it with a smile and my innate sort of ‘nod-and-wink’ irreverence but, always, always, always there was the weight of what I believed was a very serious responsibility not to do or say anything that would undermine the mission I deeply believed in. Always a restraint about the occasional difference between how I might respond as a person and a professional and how it was appropriate to respond as a representative of my employer.

When you have a job as a professional, especially one in a senior management position, you need to be ever-mindful of how your actions may reflect on your employer. It is, to me, a fiduciary responsibility and a professional one. We don’t all get to be as vocal as Larry Ellison and get away with it. Even Steve Jobs didn’t get away with it, at first.

Loyalty, integrity and a belief reflected outward in the ability of the people you work with is the only honorable stance for a manager. It’s the only way to succeed and it’s the only way to maintain the support of the people who report to you and who you have to work with every day. Ironically, I was hardly this politically correct in internal conversations. This too, I believe needs to be a core value in doing a job as a professional. Two conflicting obligations: Speak up inward and be measured outward.

Now though, I’m not employed by any one company. I am consulting and in a variety of disciplines from my professional history. Now, I am blessed with the opportunity to commit career suicide in a blog. Lucky me!

Now, I get to, perhaps have to. speak my mind publicly about what I believe in. Now, the mere fact I express any opinion or advocate political contribution or action isn’t a breach of an editorial firewall. What I say won’t get me fired, or, worse yet, it won’t make me feel I am disloyal to goals and ideals I committed to when I took a job. Now, I just have to be responsible to my own integrity.

I have a responsibility to be willing and able to speak my mind and, I hope, back up my assertions. I need to be able to hear criticism and disagreement and modify my position. I need to be a participant. And…

I need to be prepared to suffer the consequences arising from the inevitability that some potential clients or employers may not want to work with me because of my opinions.

My hope is that I will get thoughtful and even highly critical comments and that I’ll learn from them. My hope is that I can bring sufficient balance and maturity to this that it will attract as many as it might repel.

Here’s hoping my wishes come true. Once more into the breach my friends…..