Making sure technology works
Hello everyone! This issue marks my return from a very short summer break. While I am still not working at full speed, this week has already been somewhat eventful, as I had to work on the final-ish versions of some texts, including a conference paper on automated moderation and humour (written with my wife, who researches humour and online content moderation). So I don't have much to present in terms of brand-new ideas, but today's issue includes some reflections about migrating to a new computer, as well as some recommended readings from my break, which are broadly related to the law and to how technologies may fail. Please feel free to grab a cup of your favourite beverage before moving on.
A new computer
Given the whole Green Pass situation, I did not get to travel or do many indoor activities (outside the home, that is) during my break. What I did, however, was to buy a new laptop with a dedicated graphics card. This was largely a luxury buy, since my old laptop is still functional, but the price was good, and I kind of missed being able to play games released in the last 5 years or so. So one might expect to see more notes about gaming in this newsletter from now on.
As soon as the new laptop arrived, I began the boring process of migrating my activities to it. The availability of cloud storage somewhat simplified this migration: after installing the synchronisation programs, many of my files were automagically transferred to the new machine, saving lots of time. Yet, I still had some headaches. The first one was adapting myself to the Italian keyboard layout, which lacks some symbols I need both for the languages I write on (such umlauts or as various acute accents that are common in Portuguese) and for programming (tough to do anything without a tilde and a backtilde). Here, my solution was to download the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and add the missing keys.
My solution to the layout problem points towards another thing that took me more time than expected: deciding which operating system to use. Until 2019 or so, I was mostly a Linux user, but I have returned to Windows 10 (and now 11). In part, this has to do with the fact that I no longer write code for a living. As I now write a lot in Portuguese and English, MS Word turns out to be the best tool for text processing for three reasons:
The overall user experience is much more pleasant than what LibreOffice (or, for that matter, LyX) offers;
MS Word has nice integrations with other parts of my workflow, such as Zotero and Grammarly; and
It is easier to share files with your Word-based coauthors.
Since many of my coauthors use MS Word for their work, I decided to use Windows full-time instead of just keeping a dual boot for playing Windows-only games. But embracing the .docx format comes with some disadvantages. Even though I am not a big fan of LaTeX (something that I plan to write about in the future), a plain-text workflow actually has several advantages for social science research, such as the possibilities offered by version control and easier integration with tools such as R and Python.
So, I have been experimenting with compromise solutions that allow me to write in a plain-text format such as Markdown while still benefitting from collaboration and nice tools. Regarding user experience, I find that working on text files with editors such as emacs is actually a smoother experience than what we have on a word processor. Lately, I have been trying emacs's org-mode, which not only uses an interesting text format but also provides good tools for converting your plain text into PDF, LaTeX and other common formats. Combine that with pandoc, and we have a good way to convert your text into Word files and vice-versa. There are also packages for connecting emacs with Zotero, but the grammar functions offered by the open-source environment still pale in comparison with Grammarly (or MS Word's embedded review tools). Still, I hope to work out the details and find a suitable plain-text workflow.
Even if I succeed in that task, I still plan to stick with Windows for the sake of convenience. But my initial dabbling with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) suggests that I can benefit from the various advantages a Linux environment offers for programming-based work. Given that my interest in programming nowadays is casual, this seems to be a good compromise solution. Let's see if that works for me.
Recommendations
Dinosaurs (1990–1994)
This 1990s TV series, nowadays available at Disney+ in various countries around the world, has aged surprisingly well. It is a sitcom centred around a family of dinosaurs, providing social commentary and laughs through the medium of animatronic puppets. The Wiki page for the show provides a long list of social issues that were explored during the 4-season run of the show, but its final episode, dealing with climate change, is on a league of its own. I recommend Portuguese speakers watch this one in the Brazilian dub, rather than the original voices.
Guru Madhavan, The Greatest Show on Earth (Issues in Science and Technology, 10 August 2021)
An interesting read on how innovation-centric discourses about technology overlook the work involved in maintaining actually existing technology. This oversight misleads both the study of technology and technological practices, because the functioning of technical objects depends on constant work to keep things going. Furthermore, innovation itself is only possible because of the maintenance that keeps innovation-supporting infrastructure at work, as my experience with the new laptop provides a trivial example. So any serious studies of technology in the world should examine the work and the decisions required for keeping existing technologies operational, rather than just paying attention to the new shiny thing, as studies of information and communication technologies often do.
Jaakko Husa, Comparative Law, Literature and Imagination: Transplanting Law into Works of Fiction (2021) 28 Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 371.
Legal transplants exist in the real world, but they turn out to be mutated transplants or even irritants. In this paper, Husa proposes an interesting move that is very in line with what I have in mind for my "law and sci-fi" research: that a comparative analysis of law in fiction between different cultures might allow us to look at environments in which legal transplants happen without the various forms of attrition that afflict them in the real world. Comparative law and literature may thus help us understand cross-cultural differences when it comes to law.
David Enoch, Talia Fisher and Levi Spectre, Does Legal Epistemology Rest on a Mistake? On Fetishism, Two-Tier System Design, and Conscientious Fact-Finding (2021).
Many recent works on legal epistemology have sought to bring insights from epistemology into the law. Enoch, Fisher and Spectre argue here that such approaches depart from a mistaken starting point: that knowledge is relevant for judicial proceedings. Instead, what matters is accuracy, and even then only to a certain extent, as judicial proceedings must attend to various non-epistemic values. I find myself persuaded by the negative claim by the authors' negative claim — that traditional epistemology is as relevant for procedural law as the studies of human intelligence are relevant for understanding military intelligence operations —, but their pluralistic solution (distinguishing between relevance for individual actors and relevance for the system) seems a bit untenable. Still, a worthwhile read for those interested in epistemology and the limits of its application to the law.
Kurt Opsahl, ‘If You Build It, They Will Come: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship Around the World’ (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 11 August 2021)
Apple's proposals for client-side filtering of child sex abuse material target a known and serious problem, and they even try to pay lip service to user privacy. Still, even if the technical issues were addressed, the client-side filters would remain problematic. Despite Apple's claims that they would resist any government demands to expand the use of client-side filters beyond their original, narrow scope, Opsahl's text shows how existing legislation — not just at dictatorships, but at countries such as Brazil, Australia or the UK — might compel the company to deploy the same technologies to suppress other forms of content, sometimes even without a modicum of transparency to the public.
Well, that is it for today! If you arrived at this newsletter through an online link, please feel free to subscribe and receive it via email. Also, comments are always welcome — you can hit "reply" to this email or contact me via social networks. See you next week.