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These images were circulating on the Internet. The caption stated:

http://www.businessinsider.com/category/millennials this is such an interesting battle in tonal shifts of “ungrateful millennials” and “ways we’re exploiting millennials” and “7 sexy tips to degrade and humiliate your milennial into submission” and “why your milennials are leaving you”

This is my response:

When they’re talking about millenials, they really mean the off-spring of white affluent baby boomers and/or descendants. And while this group might be less prosperous than their parents, we should perhaps step back and question whether their parents wealth was ever deserved in the first place.

I would argue that the prosperity of the privileged among our parents’ generation was the product of exploitation on an international scale. In the twentieth century through colonialism, and then through flexing our might that was only gained through the lottery of history. I would maintain that globalization has acted as an equalizer for this. That the more we created disparities between different economies, the greater the push back as the global community started to get smaller and smaller.

But this doesn’t speak to practices that serve to exploit our own in order to artificially maintain the level of comfort this privileged class has come accustomed to. Like using free labour via unpaid internships, reducing taxes by making the young pay for more of their own post-secondary while simultaneously making it a quasi-requirement for many jobs that don’t even need it, putting downward pressure on minimum wages, and cutting benefits for new entrants. Policies that target the young and other new arrivals to this game that have it much tougher, like immigrants and those re-entering the work force.

Because that’s how power works. Those who have it serve themselves, and go so far as to eat their own young – even if such acts aren’t recoverable, and have a permanent effect on future prosperity. The young don’t have power, so they get exploited.

But perhaps worse of all is that all the young who are targeted now, will only gladly take hold of whatever power they do garner so that they can repeat the process all over again to the next generation.

Because they think, erroneously, that they deserve it.

 

Last month, a contractor working for the NSA leaked documents revealing that the American government was spying on all of its citizens. I use the term ‘spying’ in the context of confidential communications being intercepted and analyzed without the consent of the parties involved. It’s a loaded word but I think it’s an appropriate one.

There’s an enormous amount to dissect here. One could look at the asymmetric government response between the source of the leaks and the journalists that popularized them. One could question whether dangling execution for revealing the existence of a general government program lends itself to greater accountability. One could wonder if such surveillance frameworks stifles dissent, and therefore impinges the velocity towards a freer and more open state.

What I will focus on today is how this revelation shouldn’t have come as a shock, and why we really ought to have a conversation about privacy in this connected era. This shouldn’t have come as a shock on the basis of three facts:

Signal intelligence agencies are mandated to intercept Internet traffic.

It’s in the namesake. Signals intelligence agencies are required to intercept signals to further the interest of a government. That means intercepting the forms of communications people use. That means the Internet.

I think the uneasiness stems from the fact that previously that would have stirred in the popular mind imagery of listening to satphone calls. Something that affects a few with ties to foreigners. Them. The Internet is everyone. It’s us.

Confirmation of the interception of Internet traffic for the public came in 2006 with the Room 641A story.

Place and content is an intangible on the Internet given the way its put together, so if you want to spy on anyone on the Internet, you really have to spy on everyone.

The concept of geopolitical boundaries has little meaning on the Internet. When you send data across the Internet, you’re not telling it you want it to go to a specific geographical location. You’re telling it you want it to go to a specific computer. That computer has an address, a set of digits that whose ensemble is structured according to the relationship computers have with each other. Not place. Place does not have much meaning here.

So when signal intelligence agencies collects all of this data, it doesn’t really have the ability to distinguish between what’s being sent by citizens to citizens and what’s being exchanged between foreigners. It all looks the same.

Not that that ever mattered much to begin with, since there was data sharing arrangements meaning that everyone was always accessible.

Non-governmental bodies were already conducting this type of data collection openly for years. The only difference was that the level of access and intent, but it wasn’t too far off.

Google goes through your emails to determine what ads to feed you. Advertising companies track you through the images they post on pages throughout the Internet to figure out your shopping habits, and target you that way. Companies specialize in foraging the Internet for all information on you, and develop detailed profiles that they sell to other corporations. All without your explicit consent.

This is intelligence gathering. And while you may think that a company has far less access to you than someone tapping your connection, it’s actually surprisingly detailed. It was only natural for signal intelligence agencies, which are always required to be on the cusp of technology, to mirror this kind of analysis.

So where to now?

The corollary is that it’s likely that every signals intelligence agency in the world is doing the very same. I doubt very much that this operation is unique to the NSA.

This development was to be expected. We can expect as machine intelligence algorithms improve and the data sets bigger and more rich that we will reach a level of scrutiny on individuals and groups that isn’t too far from the targeted manned observation of yore.

So the question becomes – how do we want to handle privacy in a world where our actions are becoming more transparent by the day, and the analysis of that information ever so more accessible. Because this really is a new problem, and I think it’s not necessarily appropriate to frame it through the lens of twentieth century privacy concerns.

There is great benefit to funnelling more and more of our activities through the single medium known as the Internet, and more specifically the world wide web. We are talking on it. We are shopping on it. We are banking on it. We reveal our location on it. It has made everything more accessible, but that’s a two way street. Our own thoughts, derived from our writings and actions, are now all the more accessible to entities both public and private.

We really ought to have a conversation about the implications of this transparency on the Internet. That’s unlikely to happen, however, as there’s no impetus. This surveillance is invisible. You don’t see someone outside going through your mail, reading it for keywords with which to potentially act upon you. That lends itself to both apathy and ignorance.

That’s too bad, because our exposure only increases by the day.

Introduction

So I’ve been mulling the idea for creating a visual programming environment for quite some time. I’m a firm believer that creating simple applications should be no more complicated than getting a handle on Excel or Access. That you could really reduce wasted time if there was an ability for individuals to automate.

This continues and mildly revises my previous post on the subject.

GUI Driven Development

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) encapsulate in a very quick and approachable way the basic gist of what your program does. More or less unless there’s a button for it, your application won’t do it.

I argue that in this visual programming environment, the GUI would be what you put together first. And that the complexity of putting it together, as a baseline, should be no more than that of putting mockups together with tools such as Balsamiq, pictured below.

And then it would be from that that your program logic would be dictated. Kind of something like pictured below.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that when people who aren’t that familiar with programming visualize programs, what they’re thinking of isn’t the logic behind the scene that will make it happen. They think of how it will look. How it will behave emanates from that.

I think that that pattern of thinking should be reflected in the environment they use.

Maintaining Relevancy

Keeping on the theme of GUI Driven Development would be to let users create the interfaces that are in keeping with the software they actually use. That means allowing for some of the design patterns we see in mobile apps – flicking panes, for instance – in addition to the standard repository of widgets.

You want people to be able to create applications that look like the “real” software they use. None of this standard input/output on the command-line. The command-line interface is extremely valuable, but it’s also not what the target audience for this programming environment would want to put together.

Code as a First Class Citizen

After having seen someone use visual programming to carry a rather big project into production, it became clear that using visual elements to dictate program logic was at times really unwieldy.

There was a few problems. One, the issue of clutter. Big programs became a wire diagram so complicated that reading and interpreting the code would have been easier to understand.

That can solved by grouping blocks into hierarchies and traversing them through these hierarchies using an infinite canvas, ideas I spoke of in my previous post. But I think also by really supporting the inclusion of code. I had also mentioned the support for integrating code before as well, and had drawn up this kind of concept:

I think what has changed is the idea that this ought to be a first class citizen in this programming environment, such that it wouldn’t be an impairment as compared to dictating logic using visual block elements. That means really reducing the boiler plate involved in the example provided by the picture above, as well.

Forgetting Performance

I had spoken of parallelism in the previous post. I think concurrency is inherent to a visual programming environment like this, parallelism less so. And I think I would drop some concepts I had the last time, like explicitly passing arrays from block to block.

This model for the construction of software would likely yield worse performance than any other solution out there. That’s okay, because unless you’re talking about processing data, that hit isn’t usually noticeable to a user. Furthermore, the end goal is to create a means of developing software that is easy to use. And in that context, performance isn’t the prime consideration.

Collaboration

In the previous post I talked about integrating code revisioning into the programming environment. Such that you could, with the aid of a slider, view how code changed over each of a branch’s revisions. Then you could create a new branch from any one point.

But I also think that a page should be taken out of the likes of GitHub in terms of how to collaborate with code. I would introduce the ability to graphically annotate blocks for code reviews, and enable discussions.

Conclusion

Writing the back-end to make this all happen is quite straight forward. I can put together an interpreter and debugger rather quickly. What’s really challenging is actually creating the user interface: the front-end.

There’s nothing out there that seems like a good match for what I’m trying to achieve. I’ve been playing around with QtQuick, which is great for presenting items and handling user interaction. However, it’s not designed to cope with custom shapes like those I’d need to generate a dynamic flow chart.

So what I’m looking at now is something like jsPlumb to implement the flowchart with a WebKit-powered HTML5 front-end. The back-end would then handle compiling the code, and the two would talk to each other using web sockets. I want to ditch all the ideas like an infinite canvas to get the idea at its most basic running – and then I’ll worry about growing the project from there.

On June 10th 2003, the first legal same-sex marriage was performed in Ontario. Two years later, it would be legal across the country.

It was an important milestone as it very visibly undermined one of the many ways that queers were being othered. But if you were to listen to the discussion around queer issues today, and around this ten year mark in particular, you’d swear that everything is now peachy Canada. If you listen to the political parties, if you listen to various gay organizations even, what they’re talking about are marriage and discrimination abroad. The home front is seen as a done deal.

Granted, there is some talk about issues over here – but that talk only finds a supportive note if it’s around the only form of queerdom that’s attained social acceptability: same-sex attraction. So that’s what the media attention revolves around: incidences of rural homophobia, bullying, and suicides of gay youth.

These issues absolutely merit attention, and are not isolated incidents but reflective of entrenched prejudices that are so normalized as to become invisible. My beef isn’t that there is coverage of these issues, it’s that all other narratives – queer narratives – are denied space.

But that’s how marginalization works. For other issues to be perceived as legitimate, the people themselves have to be seen as legitimate – and that’s not the case in Canada.

Take the plight of trans folks. In the last Ontario election, a major political party was able to distribute vitriolic literature that called this segment of the population a threat to children. In federal politics a few months ago, MPs were saying that trans women existed to prey on women.

This is not the exception. This is the norm. The environment we have is toxic. Street harassment is extremely common. Suicide and homelessness rates for trans folk are far higher than gay folk, bashings are too common, but you’ll almost never hear about any of that. Meanwhile even protections on gender expression are thought to be so out there that MPs removed it from an anti-discrimination bill.

Our society only thinks it’s tolerant because it views the perspective of everyone it doesn’t tolerate as illegitimate. We are far from accepting.

And I guess I’m most bothered that events on “LGBT rights” that are more or less just occasions to have people say how things are nice now for the average urban white cis-gendered middle-class working-age able-bodied gay person. There’s no recognition of how dismal things are for other queers – even other gays.

Where do you hear about how retirement homes can be so bad that gay seniors have to go back in the closet? Where is the solidarity with Ontario students in Catholic schools, which distribute bigoted literature calling them intrinsically disordered? Where is the anger that sex education in Ontario is being silenced because it’s daring to acknowledge the existence of non-heterosexuals? It’s the perfect venue to talk about it, but no one does.

And I think it’s because lots of gay folk, in particular those middle-class urban gays who have come to occupy the rights discourse, believe in the same system of oppression that once viewed their existence as a problem. They’re the type that think Pride would be better if there weren’t those icky leather men there, the type that view poly families with contempt, the type that view gender non-conforming individuals with disgust.

Meanwhile, they’ve eviscerated the agents of change that created the space they now inhabit. Pride in the major cities is more or less just a commercial event now, with decisions made to remove any political element as its objectionable. Because affirming your own self in a world that seeks to police you from existence is objectionable.

Ten years. Lots has changed. More hasn’t.