URGENT!!! "Attention Must Be Paid": Techno-Responsibility (31 May 2013)

         This is a brief meditation based on my phone messages, week's mail, "e" and otherwise, and an important episode in Lisa Mason's  Arachne (1990).

Arachne is a "kinder, gentler" cyberpunk novel, but those standards leave a lot of room for cruelty and nastiness; and Mason's protagonist, Carly Nolan, is a near-future attorney who spends a fair portion of the novel as an ambitious and nasty young shark at prey in "telelink" (= cyberspace, no ™).

         Carly comes up with a way of robbing a widow by dealing with the widow's intellectual property — the widow's mite left her by her husband — as "intangible real property" in cyberspace to which Carly gets a court to apply the legal doctrine of "adverse possession. You don't need, it's just that the widow in theory could have defended her (intellectual) property against a large, rapacious corporation but failed to do so (ch. 7). So the company exploited her property without her knowledge for a considerable period, and then got ownership of the property — a valuable invention — because they had exploited it unopposed for that period.

         Mason has committed here the satiric act of reductio ad finem & absurdum: pushing an idea until it gets absurd and grotesque. She is artfully showing us possibly future horrors in the law and moving her plot and developing her protagonist and doing all sorts of literary, fictive things.

         Still ….

         Still, in our world, today, if you and I can keep an eye on our accounts and business dealings — keep in "constant contact" with our money and such, 24/7 — if we can take thorough responsibility for managing our money and protecting our interests, then are we obligated to do so? Along with that, if we can stay on the web and track our packages and check our flights and watch our investments and all — if we can handle such matters, what are the obligations of the large companies with whom we deal?

         At one time, it looked like someone was using my credit card to buy drinks for the house in a pub in Scotland when I was definitely in Oxford, Ohio. Turns out that was a mistake, but I got a personal call from someone in the credit card anti-fraud office. Would that happen today? Would it be legally sufficient for them if the credit card folk left a robo-call voice message for me, telling me to go on line and check my account?

         More generally — and importantly, since there are legal protections with credit card (identity) theft — more generally, what kind of "due diligence," or simply effort, is required of companies that want to contact me on matters serious for me? (Or you, but I care more about me.)

         Since I can keep a cell phone with me almost all the time, am I expected to? There are families who do expect to be in "constant contact" with one another, and I've heard of parents who get upset if their kids don't call them frequently or if the kids fail to "pick up" immediately when the parents call. And I know parents who're pretty much constantly available for their offspring, including older-teen offspring who at least should be no longer children.

         Am I expected to take calls from robots and/or listen to entire spiels on voice-mail? Has a company made a good-faith effort to contact me if they send me mail that is less than first class and ambiguously labeled, if there's a return address at all?

         My questions here are loaded, but not rhetorical.

         So I'm making a public announcement, right here on the web where any company that takes personal corporate responsibility can see it: You want to contact me — have a human being call me on a regular phone (not some high-tech multiple-dialer from a cube-farm phone bank) and talk to me. Or have a human send me a letter or an e-mail and label it so that I'll know it's something I need to read and deal with.

         And for The Powers That Be in the Postal Service: Sell stamps that make clear what the hell the stamps are and what they cost and signify. And alert the Federal Trade Commission to come down with both feet with their cleats on on any company that implies to us old farts and other gullible sorts that we owe such companies money and/or that they have an URGENT MESSAGE!!! for us.

         Nowadays people can keep track of all our dealings and we could open and read all our mails. We could take all our calls or listen to all the messages. But we'd be gullible idiots to do so.

         So, all you corporate people out there (and "Corporations are people, my friend"): Those are my policies, right here is cyberspace for you to see and read and study: and they are policy stated, I'll modestly assert, with far more brevity and clarity than, say, your average End-User License Agreement. That you could have checked out my blog means that you should have — and should be aware of my personal, hence corporate-equivalent, policies: policies that are soon, I hope, to be legally binding.

Still Nobody Special (10 Aug. 2014)

            I just returned from some travels and have been reinforced in my views that I am nobody special, but, also, so are most people — both human people and corporate people, as in "Corporations are people, my friend."
            On my travels earlier in the summer, I returned to Miami University, where I taught for thirty-five years and from which I retired in 2006. They are doing quite well without me, or at least as well as with me, and I was generally unremembered and my visit unremarked. In Oxford, OH, a living legend I am not. More recently, I went up to the Chicago area and found myself in the payment line at the cafeteria at the most excellent, if now expensive-to-visit, Field Museum. Finally arriving for the wallet-ectomy for a turkey burger, I was greeted with "Hi-ya, buddy; how's it goin'?" by the young cash-register jockey, before he announced the price. I don't know why — possibly because I was under some pressures on the visit, possibly just getting in touch with my inner asshole — I responded with, "I don't want to come across as uppity, but I'd prefer 'sir,'" which he called me, and was good enough to repeat the price. I wished him a nice day with sincerity, since he seemed like a nice young man, working what must be a pretty boring job and probably in need of as good a day as I could wish for him.
            What I didn't need was a reminder that I was just another body in a cafeteria line and "buddy" to a guy who could've been my grandson.
            Returning home, I got to various kinds of mail I'll get to in a moment, and got to my computer and a chance to check up on The 6^th Friend, a movie I'm associated with, and which you should all go out to see if it ever gets released IN A THEATER NEAR YOU!!! or buy on Amazon or at least order from Netflix. While on the IMDb site for the film, I committed an act of autoGoogle-ization, and looked my name up on IMDb-Pro and, perversely, checked out my STARmeter ranking: it was "2,038,949, down 1,443,667 this week." So please hit those Internet Movie Database links and raise my rating: I'm currently the number of people of a good size city away from being anybody in the movie biz.
             I also, though, checked my telephone answering machine and my e-mail, and I await delivery of the usual basket of snail-mail. Even a nobody, or maybe especially a nobody — rich people can buy privacy — even this nobody is getting over a hundred solicitations each week for my time and/or money, or, only slightly less directly going for my time and money, my business.
            Again, I'm no one special, and, if you're reading this, neither are you (really special folk are reading executive summaries and IPO prospectuses and Eyes-Only intelligence portfolios). But also necessarily unspecial are all those people cold-calling me us or sending out e-blasts or mass mailings: each is just one among hundreds.
            So I repeat my call for all of us to get uppity.
            If mail doesn't come First Class with a real stamp and specific return address, if it comes with a misleading CALL FOR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION!!! — toss it. Let the mass mailers pay full-freight and identify themselves if they want to get us to read their appeals.
            If you answer a phone call and get "dead air," you're almost certainly being called by someone using a multi-dial device. Set the phone down, and let the caller listen to some dead air for a bit, or the livelier sounds of you doing whatever you were doing before you were commercially or politically interrupted.
            If you get a robo-call with anything other than a "reverse 911" disaster alert, also set the phone down and try to keep RoboCaller on the line for the full message, making sure it's a message you don't hear.
            And don't hassle folks struggling to make a living, but when callers or clerks use your first name or "buddy" or "young (wo)man," gently advise them that they can save a syllable and show they really care by saying "sir" or "ma'am" — unless you prefer to be thought nobody special than to be reminded that you're old enough for "sir" or "ma'am."
            You'll be able to think of other things. Remember: In the battle for your figurative eyeballs and eardrums, don't be a noncombatant. Nobodies of the world, arise (it's not like we're busy with anything important)!