Could ancient laws help us sue the internet?

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Could ancient laws help us sue the internet?

Post by Nipuna » Wed May 13, 2015 10:21 am

A medieval law could help us bring to book all those responsible for algorithms that run – and ruin – our lives…
There's always a camera you don't know about (Image: Niall McDiarmid/Millennium Images, UK)
There's always a camera you don't know about (Image: Niall McDiarmid/Millennium Images, UK)
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Conference: Theorizing the Web 17/18 April, International Center of Photography, New York City

THIS century's next great legal challenge will be to make those responsible for complex systems accountable for their actions, says Kate Crawford, who works for Microsoft Research. If a bunch of unrelated algorithms, interacting in unforeseen ways, puts you under heightened surveillance, blocks your credit or stunts your kids' life choices, who do you call? Who will make redress for such unforeseen, unintended automated wrongs?

There are no clear answers to these questions, which is why Crawford wants to resurrect the deodand, an obscure legal term from the 11th century.

Only at a hip New York conference like Theorizing the Web could medieval law be proposed as the answer to the great legal battle of our age. Now in its fifth year, the event is widely regarded as the coolest kid on an already crowded block. Its participants are dressed more for a music festival than an academic conference. They are sociologists who code, coders who do social theory, hackers who make art, and artists who hack. Who else would listen to an exegesis on deodands in the bare, unfinished venue for New York City's International Center for Photography, with dusty floors and terrible acoustics that are better suited to a rave?

In medieval England, personal property became a deodand if it was judged responsible for the death of a human being, and, as such, was forfeit to the monarch. Its owner was ordered to pay a fine equal to the object's value to the court. Everything from haystacks to pigs and horses were defined as deodands. The practice was revived in the 1830s to hold railway companies to account for train deaths, but paying a fine equal to the value of an expensive train every time someone died in a crash proved unworkable.

Crawford argues that the deodand was killed off by corporate capitalism's ability to shape its own legal accountability. She says we must be wary of allowing technology companies to use unseeable complexity as a reason to wash their hands when things go awry.

Her talk left me wishing that I had a more solid understanding of the way we interact with technology to hold the right people to account.

The hipness of Theorizing the Web comes not just from the youthfulness of its participants but also from the newness of their work. Many of the delegates were presenting work in progress, or the results of as-yet-unfinished doctorate theses.

Our continuing post-Snowden obsession with privacy and surveillance loomed large at the conference. For instance, Joshua Scannell at the City University of New York analysed Microsoft's Domain Awareness System, a smart city crime monitoring and prediction system developed in association with the NYPD. By collating public and police information with data collected by sensors across the city – including radiation sensors sensitive enough to pick up recent chemotherapy treatment – the Awareness system creates "heat maps" of risk.

"The absence of sensor data is not the absence of information," Scannell told the conference. A lack of credit card transaction activity in a neighbourhood, for example, allows the system's users to make judgements about that area's residents, their levels of wealth or poverty, and to then associate them with the potential for crime.

This system is a tech-savvy, yet sociologically simplistic form of social labelling. Reducing human activities to metrics is being marketed as a way to combat racial and social bias. But such pigeonholing feeds reactionary policies as efficiently as it informs other kinds. Efficiency is always draconian, and good intentions never survive algorithms.

Nestled between ageing stores selling white goods and the restaurants of Chinatown, the centre is a few doors from the Bowery Mission homeless shelter. Like most of New York, this neighbourhood faces a wave of gentrification – a process often typified by hip young people standing around in bare, dusty art spaces. How long before rising rents put the kitchen stores out of business and make them as bare and dusty as this venue, I wondered. Presumably, the Chinese restaurants will then buy their fridges and ovens online.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Can we sue the web?"

Tim Maughan is a writer based in New York
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