Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

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James Grimmelmann of New York Law School has written a terrific essay on privacy issues and social networks services entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy.

Grimmelmann is trying to do nothing less than re-shape our attitude towards privacy on social networks, building an erudite and extensively documented argument that our framing of privacy problems, and most of the solutions we have in mind, are bad fits for social networking services.

There are no ideal technical controls for the use of information in social software. The very idea is an oxymoron; “social” and “technical” are incompatible adjectives here. Adding “friendYouDontLike” to a controlled vocabulary will not make it socially complete; there’s still “friendYouDidntUsedToLike.” As long as there are social nuances that aren’t captured in the rules of the network (i.e., always), the network will be unable to prevent them from sparking privacy blowups. [...]

Another reason that comprehensive technical controls are ineffective can be found in Facebook’s other "core principle": that its users should "have access to the information others want to share." If you’re already sharing your information with Alice, checking the box that says “Don’t show to Bob” will stop Facebook from showing it Bob, but it won’t stop Alice from showing it to him. [...]

There’s also another way of looking at "information others want to share": If I want to share information about myself -- and since I’m using a social network site, it’s a moral certainty that I do -- anything that makes it harder for me to share is a bug, not a feature. Users will disable any feature that protects their privacy too much.

For me, the essential pair of insights in this paper are that a) our attitudes towards privacy are shaped by industrial norms -- the individual vs. the corporation or the state -- while on social networks, the most important class of privacy violations are in fact peer-to-peer and b) that these violations, when they happen, are a side-effect of the system doing what it is designed to do, which is to facilitate the spread of personal information.

The first challenge is re-shaping our sense of what a privacy violation means in the context of social network services, and the second is to accept that, since a full stemming of these violations is prima facie impossible, we need a new set of practices around minimizing them where possible and improving recovery from them where possible.

Because of the enormity of the head-shift required to think through peer-to-peer privacy risks, and because Grimmelmann has worked through the issues so carefully and thoroughly, I think this should be required reading for anyone thinking about privacy as it is actually lived.

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

Cinematic Titanic -- the creator-driven successor to the fantastic Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- has a new installment just in time for the holidays: this month, the guys kick the crap out of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" (which has plenty of crap to kick!). For those of you who haven't been following this excellent series, the premise is simple: the five Cinematic Titanic comics are present in silhouette, superimposed over the picture, coming up with snappy jokes every second or so. I average about two belly laughs a minute, and about ten times more chuckles. The Cinematic Titanic guys are basically an artist-owned co-op who record and release this stuff off their own bat, direct to you at $15 a pop. Screw "It's a Wonderful Life," and to hell with the merely kitschy experience of watching "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" without commentary. It is only through the auspices of Cinematic Titanic that the holidays can truly be realized.

Cinematic Titanic: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)

Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.

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As the price of oil has fallen from its dramatic highs of just a few months, ago, I often find myself thinking back to an essay by Yegor Gaidar, an economist and acting prime minister of Russia from 1991 to 1994. The essay, The Soviet Collapse, is subtitled "Grain and Oil" and tells the story of the end of the Soviet Union as the interaction of the price of those two goods.

The Soviet Collapse starts with the history of centrally-managed grain production, an unmitigated but slow-motion disaster, which they then proceeded to patch by importing grain with the budget surplus from rising oil prices, starting in the 1970s. That worked for a while, and then it stopped working.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust. [...] the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a policy of effectively disregarding the problem in hopes that it would somehow wither away. Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely.

For an economics essay filled with price and output charts, it's a surprisingly gripping read. It's also a reminder of what's at stake now. Because oil consumption matters more than production to English-speaking countries, our press often covers the price of oil as a question of how often people drive to the mall. For countries like Russia, however, now as much as then, the price of oil has profound existential ramifications. Re-reading this, I got a picture of how geo-politically dramatic 2009 could turn out to be.

The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil

The Obsolete Technology Website has a gallery of 100+ obsolete computers. Lovely.

Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website (via Beyond the Beyond)

A paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience describes a study that concludes that poor children aged 9 and 10 are likely to have lowered brain activity, comparable to a stroke victim. The researchers say that it's due to growing up in a stressful, "resource poor" environment, with "fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums." However, the effects can be remediated through playing stimulating games.

"When paying attention to the triangles, the prefrontal cortex helps you process the visual stimuli better. And the prefrontal cortex is even more involved in detecting novelty, like the unexpected photographs," he said. But in both cases, "the low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well. They were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex."

"These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage," Kishiyama said. "Yet, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as efficiently as it should be. This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school performance."

Poor Children's Brain Activity Resembles That Of Stroke Victims, EEG Shows

Tor.com's Bridget McGovern sums up my anxiety at the thought of Alex Cox and David Lynch making a sequel to Repo Man called Repo Chick, "set against the background of the credit crunch."

I don’t know. I’m nervous, but also kind of excited to see what Cox comes up with. My biggest question, though, is about the soundtrack: how can the sequel even attempt to match the original in terms of music, when it remains one of my favorite soundtracks of all time? Iggy Pop, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, The Plugz, and The Circle Jerks...the music is the heart and soul of Repo Man, and perfectly captured the essence of the gritty Los Angeles punkdom of the time. Not that there’s not a ton of great music out there, but what really compares nowadays? At least Iggy’s still out there rocking, same as he ever was, but it will be interesting to see who else will help Cox fuel his anarchic punk vision all over again...

Here’s Hoping Alex Cox’s Repo Man Sequel Isn’t One Big Circle Jerk

The CU Edible Book fesitval celebrates my three favourite things: literacy, food and horrible puns. Check out the Lard of the Rings, featured here!

The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 3rd Annual C-U Edible Book Festival (Thanks, 7-how-7!)

The Internet Archive's public domain audio archive has dozens of vintage radio dramas from the Columbia Workshop -- everything from Shakespeare to Moby-Dick to "The History of the US Patent System".

Columbia Workshop at the Internet Archive, Columbia Workshop on Wikipedia (Thanks, Claude!)

The Chaos Communication Congress, held later this month in Berlin, will feature Open Attendee Meta-Data (OpenAMD) RFID badges that will track attendees' every movement, simulating life in the high-tech totalitarian state that many of the world's "free" nations are busy erecting.

Growing from the success of the OpenAMD Project at The Last HOPE in New York City this past summer, the CCC will be joining forces with SocioPatterns.org to add a real time proximity detection system so users can know what other users are nearby. In addition, users can log into a web interface that will suggest talks they might like and other attendees with similar interests. With this system, attendees will be able to see where they've been, what they've been doing, and with whom.

The OpenAMD system will be using several visual effects to display this, including an AJAX visual accessible from the conference website and a 3-D visual based on cutting edge graphics technology. This year will also introduce "Beacon Royale", an RFID-based game spanning the whole building where participants engage in virtual combat against each other. The system is completely open source, open hardware, and all the tracking data will be made available to the public after the conference.

How will surveillance feel in ten years? (Thanks, Aestetix!)

Prague's sovkitsch (Commiepunk?) Museum of Communism has some funny e-card designs that combine Socialist Realism with snappy captions.

Museum of Communism: E-Cards (Thanks, Marilyn!)

RIP, Forrest J Ackerman, the pioneering science fiction fan, editor and writer who coined the term "sci-fi" and founded Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. 4e left the party on December 4, at 92, after a long illness. of heart failure at home at the legendary Ackermansion in Los Feliz in Los Angeles.

Among those who grew up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland was author Stephen King. Other childhood readers included movie directors Joe Dante, John Landis and Steven Spielberg, who once autographed a poster of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" for Ackerman, saying, "A generation of fantasy lovers thank you for raising us so well."

Ackerman was a celebrity in his own right, once signing 10,000 autographs during a three-day monster-movie convention in New York City.

This, after all, was the man who created and wrote the comic book characters Vampirella and Jeanie of Questar and was the ultimate fan's fan: a man who actually had known Lugosi and Karloff and whose priceless collection of science-fiction, horror and fantasy artifacts ran to some 300,000 items.

Forrest J Ackerman, writer-editor who coined 'sci-fi,' dies at 92 (Thanks to all the readers who suggested this!)

(Image: Forrest J Ackerman at the Ackermansion.jpg by Alan Light, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)