Sometimes I feel like the only person who cares about my freedom to direct my own life or the privacy and security of information about me. I bought a MacBook Air a couple of years ago because it seemed light and robust enough to carry around. The hardware meets expectations but so does the software. By this I mean I have always disliked Apple’s arrogant attitude (that is since before the Steve’s started building machines) and now ever so much more so. Let me give you a few examples.
“iCloud works by storing your information securely on a remote server. This online storage capability is also known as “cloud” storage. By securely storing your information online, you can access this information from any device, at any time.” Just what do they mean by “secure”? Any knowledgeable hacker with 2 minutes’ access to my MacBook can get my Apple ID and access to my iCloud account. Bingo — s/he has access to anything stored locally on my hard drive and everything in iCloud. How’s that for security?
OK. So I just won’t use iCloud. Try it. Most of the applications I want to use assume that iCloud will be enabled. The documentation on how to reset the defaults is obscure if it exists at all.
And about Apple help/support/documentation. Have you ever noticed how much of the text is devoted to how “awesome” your user experience is going to be and how little explanation there is about the structure of the software system you are expected to use? Sure, it’s intuitive if you only skim the surface of the program’s capabilities. But not if you are used to any other operating system.
I suppose I should keep my mouth shut while the Steve Jobs admiration frenzy is still in full swing but his legacy is haunting me. Apple is positioning itself to infiltrate every aspect of my existence: communications, entertainment, purchasing, my work (since most of that takes place online), and my movement around the planet. What is to prevent it from transitioning from tracking what I do to dictating what I am allowed to do?
I’m picking on Apple because of its offensive, public presumption that I will think everything it does is groovy but the threat is just as great from its competitors, Google, MicroSoft and others. These are corporations, organized for profit, not morality. They are bigger and better managed than the governments that purport to regulate them.
We are like the proverbial frogs submitting to slowly heating water. Regardless of the accuracy of that tale, the metaphor is still relevant. We are so enthralled with the neat things that we can do with highly-connected, computer technology that most of us are not attending to the pernicious possibilities. We are lulled by claims that our data is secure when only selected segments of the communication channels are protected by encryption. Most data is transmitted in the clear during some portion of its journey. We think of “the cloud” as some sort of heaven for data rather than a physical box full of memory chips under the control of human administrators and programmers. Don’t think for a minute that the security backdoors required by the NSA can’t be opened by anyone else.
What’s the solution? I’m not sure now any more than I was when my phone was tapped during the Viet Nam war. Although I speak out on occasions like this, I mostly lead a quiet, uncontroversial life. Let’s hope nobody notices.
Hello Liza,
I think the purpose of business should be to provide a mechanism where people in community can get in where they fit in to help push currency around the community where everyone can thrive together and a fair exchange is traded with a much higher conscious level of capitalism. Yes, profits are made but that should not be the main purpose of the entity. Our relationships with one another and overall health of community should be considered in the measurement of the success of a business. i.e. If a business in Orange County has recorded its highest profits ever in the history of the existence of that business but, yet the county has reported 30,000 homeless children and growing each year; is that business still a success? Our cities measure the amount of water used each year but what about measuring the amount children each year that are homeless. Shouldn’t businesses in a county take part in that repair by fulfilling the need of the those children? Orange County does have 30,000 homeless children too. Each city and County has an alarming rate of “Aged Youth” hitting the streets to survive. Wouldn’t it be great to create a sustainable community housing program for cities and counties with a “Child First” focus that is duplicateable, affordable, gives back to the giver a great ROI while building an asset backed lifestyle ecosystem which teaches each resident how to have a healthy lifestyle foundation which, over time and eventually over generations, will break patters of poverty, crime, drug and alcohol abuse while creating new social norms while strengthening the morality within the family unit throughout America if not the world?
Many thanks for your thoughtful comment, Mario and apologies for taking so long to respond. You pose several difficult questions that often trouble me. I’m reminded of anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s classification of the cultures she encountered as “high synergy” and “low synergy”. Although the term “synergy” used to be applied only to physical systems – – it describes the distribution of stress (positive or negative) around all elements of a structure compared with the concentration of a stressor at a single point – – the concept of synergy is particularly apt when applied to social systems. A society that concentrates wealth within a small groups of people and corporations while leaving large portions of its population in poverty and distress is a low synergy culture.
We need to go beyond naming this condition, however, and dig into what social practices, rules, laws, and conventions support its continuation. Can we “rewire” our low synergy communities so that the people act to benefit each other rather than compete in a constant game of oneupmanship? Many will argue that humans are inherently selfish and will always act to win zero-sum games where for one person to win someone else must lose. I agree that all lifeforms act to stay alive and protect their genetic offspring when they can. But, as Benedict points out, it’s possible for humans to create social relationships where the stress on one person or family is distributed throughout the community so that the negative stress is less likely to destroy either the individual or the community and beneficial stress can be enjoyed by both the active party and everyone around him or her. In high synergy cultures like this, individual “selfish” actions become winnings for everyone. As you put it, “Our relationships with one another and overall health of community should be considered in the measurement of the success of a business.”
This presents us with a legislative challenge: to draft and pass laws that promote high synergy relationships among citizens and to sunset those laws (Citizens United comes to mind) that permit zero-sum games to be imposed on the public. Note that I am not at all opposed to voluntary participation in competitive sports that have clear winners and losers. Many humans seem to need to play the conquerer occasionally. But I’m with you; in corporate and public life, it’s time to figure out how to conquer poverty, homelessness, crime, and substance abuse, not each other.
JOS, hmmm. In my opinion, Liza expressed herself thoughtfully and well, in prose, as she usually does and as most brilliant people do. Would you prefer she wrote in rhyming verse?
Carol (also surprised at your reaction)
Hi Liza,
Your comments are so prosaick that it makes it impossible for the uninformed to even guess that there is a truely brilliant well educated & informed mind behind them!!!!! Not surprizing you are uncertain if your feedback even works.
JOS ( surprized with my own reaction)