You're the product.

Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Senate yesterday and the House today where he primarily succeeded at demonstrating the great majority of US Congress Critters have no idea how Facebook works or what it's business model actually is. Of course, US Senators and Representatives represent their constituents, who also probably have no idea how Facebook works, and primarily think of it as a place to provide visual evidence their life is a resounding, never ending happy fest, or take solace in the carefully crafted echo chamber the platform lends itself too. For myself, neither destination was an imperative, or probable, after events at my "childhood's end" and so my use of the platform is probably not in alignment with the majority of it's users.

So, I'm preternaturally loathe to embrace tech giant schadenfreude simply because it fits into "Never Trump" desires to overturn a presidential election and gives psychological relief to the losing side. I would, in addition, observe the following:

• If you haven't paid for the service (i.e. posting Gigabytes of cat videos for perpetuity), somebody is.
• If you're using the service, you're the product (which doesn't bother me simply because I like the give and take of opposing credos and ideas, it generally results in needed revisions to ill conceived first drafts)
• People put aspects of their life on-line to get social media attention and adulation. Given that "user need", it seems silly to believe anything placed in that electronic coliseum will somehow be subject to default privacy mandates unless the user utilizes the privacy tools made available by Facebook. 
• At worse, Facebook data is utilized for a more focused form of advertising, which I've been inundated with before Facebook escaped the Harvard quad. So far I haven't fallen victim to QVC addiction, or letting an anonymous poster direct any action of mine. 
• In any case, Facebook is a piker compared to folks who are really serious about meta data analysis (i.e. Google).

From my standpoint, the availability of the platform has more value to me than the opportunity cost of making available knowledge of my personal preferences to some third party looking for a better way to sell their goods (it's analogous to Kroger's keeping track of my purchases and offering me a 3 - 4% discount on my purchases). Is there a higher, more serious cost to the use of this technology? Probably, but I doubt it has to do with getting a better response to advertising "cold calls".

When I construct software hazard analysis for non-product software, I'm most concerned with identifying hazards associated with high severity harms (I tell my team, we can live with changes in estimated hazard, or harm, occurrence, but we don't want to miss potential high severity harms). The trickiest hazards to dig out, are associated with algorithms we don't fully understand the behavior of across all possible inputs. The danger in this set of circumstances is we get a result we trust, but we don't really understand how the result was produced. Which I guess is another way of saying we are probably ill-advised to allow "expert" systems to make decisions for us. That puts us on the path of becoming a "global useless class" as a species. I don't see how that works out well for us.

Alt-J (an alternative indie band I like) has an album called "This is all yours", which works on expanding some of the themes found in movies from the 1980's which impressed one of the band's writers. "The Gospel of John Hurt" draws from the movie "Alien" (John Hurt was the actor who played a character who birthed the first alien in the movie in a very unusual fashion (hard to forget if you've seen the movie)). That type of biological entity would be catastrophic for any species actually encountering it. Needless to say, "The Gospel of John Hurt" is not a gospel of hope. Let's hope we understand the AI algorithms we're developing better than the crew of the Nostromo understood it's alien passenger in "Alien". 

Interlude and "Girl with the crooked smile, Ask her if she wants to stay awhile"

Recently started listening to some work by Maroon 5, because some stuff just starts rolling around in my head (which happens far more frequently then I care to admit) and some of their tunes just appeal to me (along with Adam Levine's stated desire to create a well-designed, marketable music style (one which does appeal to me particularly on the hustle to the morning stand-up status meeting at 8:30)). Rather than going on at length (I do usually get to my point), I'll just post them with some minimal comments. The first is from "Songs About Jane" and titled "She Will be Loved" (I've told Janet I think of it as "Songs about Janet" during what, thankfully, thinking back, was the beginning of the end for "Night2night, the lost years"):





The second tune is from the more recent "Red Pill Blues" (Love the tucked in reference to "The Matrix") and is titled "Lips on You", because I've never been able to lose the inclination we're designed to fit together and you're missing something remarkable in the human experience if you avoid the opportunity when it presents itself, or believe it limited to the shallow depths of casual liaisons; we're capable of so much more if you'll just allow yourself to believe and be that person with someone else. The vagaries of the human heart are infinitely more complicated and varied than what can be perceived on initial meetings. I think it's worth taking the time to really come to "know" the intimate partners of our life in more than the usual sense.





Analogously (at least for me!), following years of moves, studies, unexpected detours, raising children, surviving a severe surgical accident and pursuing degrees, Janet got an opportunity this past January to participate in a long dreamed of Haiti Medical Mission Trip with a number of volunteers from Good Shepherd Lutheran. Outside of the challenges of creating a sustainable health care enterprise in a desperately poor country and under-served population (subject for another day), Janet's joy in participating was palatable in this picture; a validation of the notion of love being greatest in the service of others and also of Janet's favorite "Grand Theory of Nursing" from her MSN studies, "Nursing is Caring" (succinct, but true). Maybe, particularly following Good Friday, we need to recognize real love is not always simple, or natural (we never fight (LOL)), exists most fully in the service of others, and aspire to empower and elevate our loves to actualize in the highest possible terms those capabilities God has blessed them with.

Tenabrae

A late night meditation on "Good Friday" following services that night, but held until today due to issues which took priority during the weekend and a day off yesterday.

From Isaiah 53:2-6 (NIV):

2           He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

               and like a root out of dry ground.

             He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

               nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3           He was despised and rejected by mankind,

               a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

              Like one from whom people hide their faces

                he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

4            Surely he took up our pain

                and bore our suffering,

              yet we considered him punished by God,

               stricken by him, and afflicted.

5            But he was pierced for our transgressions,

               he was crushed for our iniquities;

              the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

               and by his wounds we are healed.

6            We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

                each of us has turned to our own way;

               and the Lord has laid on him

                the iniquity of us all.

The Good Friday service at Good Shepherd Lutheran in Irvine this year was the traditional Tenebrae Service (which I've been informed is from the Latin for "darkness"). It begins in silence, continues with the gradual extinguishing of candles on the altar as gospel accounts of Christ's passion are read, and ends in near total darkness with either a door slammed shut or the lectern bible slammed shut ("strepitus", signifying the closing of the tomb with Christ's body within). Communion is never distributed on Good Friday and attendees are asked to leave in silence at service's end. Although never intended to be a joyful experience, the experience of that service always seems to emotionally resonate with me and did again this year.

I remarked on this originally back during Lent in 2010 when I was creating some early entries for this blog. At that time I mentioned some writer's observation on people easily "getting" the wreckage of Good Friday and our horror on finding ourselves periodically in circumstances where even hope seemed a luxury. I would add here, I think part of coming to faith in Christianity is coming to the recognition a fair deal of the "wreckage" we personally encounter in our lives is devised by ourselves and is not simply our "natural" reaction to circumstances which befell us. We make choices based on our desires at the time events unfold and some times those desires reflect the corruption within us. Christ, undeservedly, suffered agonies which were rightly deserved by our actions. "Tenebrae" services helps to clarify that paradigm and helps me recognize the potential for darkness within me when I look in the mirror.

I think that recognition, even within the confines of the "grace" Christ offers us, is a reminder we need agape, and in our daily lives should aspire in extending it to others even if only a weak reflection of Christ's actions for us.