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It’s Father’s Day in the States, so I thought I’d offer a brief salute to my dad.  I’ve written about him in more detail elsewhere, but it never hurts to remind myself and the world in general that he was kind, supportive, smart, loving, and did his bit to thrash Hitler.

I chose to live a life that was filled with chaos and uncertainty, and he was the solid, supportive presence in my world that allowed me to take the chances I took and fly as far from the nest as I did.

Rest in peace.

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For those of you who prefer your reading matter to be printed on dead trees instead of touch screens, I’ve got a great deal for you!

A brand-new trade paperback of my novel Angel Station is now available via Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  The book is pleasantly sized at 6×9 inches, with the highly readable text printed on cream paper, and all bound inside a glossy cover.  It should make a handsome addition to your bookshelf, and costs a mere $14.99.

[NOTE: The Barnes & Noble page currently reads “out of stock,” but that just means they haven’t printed any yet.  That should happen any second now, and then you’ll be able to order your copy.  UPDATE: the book is now in stock.]

I’m publishing these myself through services that Amazon and B&N are now making available to authors, and I’ll be re-issuing other works as time goes on.  The B&N editions may even end up at your local bookstore!  (You could, of course, make that happen by ordering a copy from your local B&N.)

And by the way, would any of you pay the extra for a hardback with a dust jacket?  I don’t know what the “extra” would be, but I could make inquiries.

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I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.

Over and over again.  Over and over again.  Over and over again.  Over and over again.  Over and over again.

. . . well, you get the picture, I’m sure.

This morning the UPS van pulled up with a package containing 700 (or maybe a thousand) signature sheets for the limited-edition, signed hardback of The Book of Swords, a new anthology with a new Ice and fire story by George R.R. Martin, and incidentally a non-Ice and Fire story by me, and non-Ice and Fire stories by other writers including Robin Hobb, CJ Cherryh, Kate Elliott, and Daniel Abraham.

The signed limited edition will be by Subterranean Press, by the way, but it isn’t yet on their website.  So if you want signage, watch this place for an announcement.

The timing, I must say, could have been better.  I’m off to Taos Toolbox on Saturday, and that means I’ve got plenty to do between now and then without writing my name over and over and over and over . . .

So I’ve spent much of the day in front of the TV, signing while I watched Amazon’s new epic six-episode documentary about the Grateful Dead, which was good because I didn’t have to watch it, all I had to do was listen.  What I was actually watching was my signature deteriorating from one page to the next, and it isn’t that legible a signature to begin with.  I sign checks and contracts with it, and that’s about it, because I learned to type when I was 10, and from that point on I typed everything, and maybe the last document I wrote in longhand was an exam in grad school, and that was a lot of decades ago.

It’s not my real legal signature anyway, it’s a special signature I developed because I could write it quickly in the event that someone dropped 1000 signature sheets on my doorstep with a short deadline.  Though I have to say it’s useful having my legal signature not be the one that everyone has access to.

So I signed until I was so clawed and cramped that I could no longer generate even a half-legible signature, and now I’m typing, which is what I do well, and when I’m done here I’ll type a lot more on Praxis VI and then go back to signing again, assuming that I can un-cramp my fingers.

Accomplishment.  This is how it’s done, cramp by cramp.

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Via Chairman Bruce, a brief survey of what the corporate oligarchy knows about me, you, and everyone else.

Facebook can recognize your emotions from your keyboard typing patterns.  They can work out your religion, your sexual orientation, and whether you use controlled substances with what they claim is a fair degree of accuracy.

And they can make mistakes.  A few months ago, I viewed on Amazon a science fiction novel by a gay author, and suddenly Amazon was offering me gay erotica, gay-themed films, and gay-themed calendars.  (I had thought that Amazon maintained a Great Wall between erotica and other forms of literature, but apparently not in the case of LGBT fiction.)

So far, so amusing, but there are gay people who are in the closet for damned good reasons, for instance to avoid being murdered by the religious crazies who infest their small, close-minded community, or to avoid imprisonment on behalf of the bare-chested judoka who runs the country.  If all those people have to do is look at a person’s Amazon page, or buy some insufficiently-anonymized data from Amazon or Facebook or Oracle, then the closet begins to look a lot more like a prison cell.

…such methods are already used to sort, categorize, label, assess, rate, and rank people not only for marketing purposes, but also for making decisions in highly consequential areas such as finance, insurance, and healthcare, among others.

They can calculate your creditworthiness without access to your actual financial transactions (which means any credit score generated in such a way is just an educated guess, not necessarily related to reality at all).  If a logarithm decides that your lifestyle is cardiac-unhealthy, or if you’re likely to get cancer, your insurance will go up.  (Hint: everyone gets cancer, assuming you live long enough, and particularly if you’re male and own a prostate.)

For example, the large insurer Aviva, in cooperation with the consulting firm Deloitte, has predicted individual health risks, such as for diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure and depression, for 60,000 insurance applicants based on consumer datatraditionally used for marketing that it had purchased from a data broker.

The consulting firm McKinsey has helped predict the hospital costs of patients based on consumer data for a “large US payor” in healthcare. Using information about demographics, family structure, purchases, car ownership, and other data, McKinsey stated that such “insights can help identify key patient subgroups before high-cost episodes occur”.

The health analytics company GNS Healthcare also calculates individual health risks for patients from a wide range of data such as genomics, medical records, lab data, mobile health devices, and consumer behavior. The company partners with insurers such as Aetna, provides a score that identifies “people likely to participate in interventions”, and offers to predict the progression of illnesses and intervention outcomes. According to an industry report, the company “ranks patients by how much return on investment” the insurer can expect if it targets them with particular interventions.

But how do they know about your health?  Your data’s supposed to be anonymized, right?

Data companies often remove names from their extensive profiles and use hashing to convert email addresses and phone numbers into alphanumeric codes such as “e907c95ef289”. This allows them to claim on their websites and in their privacy policies that they only collect, share, and use “anonymized” or “de-identified” consumer data.

However, because most companies use the same deterministic processes to calculate these unique codes, they should be understood as pseudonyms that are, in fact, much more suitable for identifying consumers across the digital world than real names.

And they know your politics, or think they do.  (I once commented on the site of a conservative who posted on Facebook, and was then inundated by offers from every wackadoodle right-wing nutjob with an internet connection.  No, I do not want to join your crusade against the Muslim Lizard People, thank you.)

(And of course the Muslim Lizard Crusade might not have been a real thing, but a phony movement designed to discredit conservatives.  Though it more often works the other way— many of the really intolerant, obnoxious Berniebros in the last election were conservatives trying to discredit the candidate they thought posed the greatest threat.)

The original purpose of this sort of data collection was to make it easier to sell you stuff that you might want, but now it’s beyond all that.  We used to worry about governments doing this sort of thing, but it turns out governments are pretty bad at it, and in any case the government is only interested in the people they’re interested in.

In 1999, Lawrence Lessig famously predicted that left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control shaped primarily by the “invisible hand” of the market. He suggested that we could “build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear”. Today, the latter has nearly been made reality by the billions of dollars in venture capital poured into funding business models based on the unscrupulous mass exploitation of data. The shortfall of privacy regulation in the US and the absence of its enforcement in Europe has actively impeded the emergence of other kinds of digital innovation, that is, of practices, technologies, and business models that preserve freedom, democracy, social justice, and human dignity.

So far internet commerce is all about building monopolies.  Anything about democracy and human dignity in that?

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