As the story of Facebook unfolds in the various courts that are considering how many billions in fines they can levy and stash in the Treasury, we are learning more about the business. We knew, of course, from the beginning that Mr. Zuckerberg was not just interested in facilitating communication among his classmates. He probably was not yet contemplating fighting for first place in the Richest Man on the Planet competition, either. Things just developed. In any case, we capitalist believers are obliged to admire him for his success. If you’re not careful envy has a way of turning all too easily into anger.
Mr. Zuckerberg has been careful. The question is whether he has been careful enough. Wiping out malaria and guinea worm counts for a lot when you are in that Richest Man race. Confrontation with Washington legislative committees maybe not so much. The success of Facebook turns on the difficult job of computer parsing uncontrolled speech into a series of neatly categorized boxes that can be counted, sorted, searched, analyzed, and sold to the highest bidder.
I had some personal experience with this problem once, trying to write a program that would identify the grammar of the words and phrases of the titles of scientific articles for the purpose of creating index references that would sound as though they had been written by humans. I had some successes, along with some spectacular failures. (My algorithm never figured out what to do with “Quo Vadis?” as a title of an essay on the future of the specialty of thassalemia research) If this was a problem in deconstructing the titles of scientific research papers whose authors have presumably been at some pains to make their titles clear enough to attract readers, how much more severe is it when trying to figure out private e-mails or intercepted messages deliberately crafted to hide secrets? Great progress has been made, as we would expect from someone who has made billions of dollars from devising a basically simple search program capable of responding to my query of “thasselemia” with a corrected spelling and a list of references. There is nevertheless a remaining area of confusion and misunderstanding, and consequent danger of illogical actions based on the results.
The answer to the problem is simple and attractive : eliminate natural language. Reduce original communication to a series of checked boxes and cute emojis, whose meanings are defined in advance. While this can probably not be enforced on the Internet world, even by Mr. Zuckerman, it can be made so attractive to the lazy or semi-literate media user that coercive enforcement may not be necessary. Like the shortcuts “u” or “r” offered e-mailers and texters as one-stroke options on their smart phones, properly defined boxes for checking are tempting just as time-savers and keyboard-error-avoiders. Emojis are not only quick, but like texting abbreviations, they are sort of fun and show that the writer is on the crest of the wave. That they can also be subtly coercive, by channeling the writer’s thoughts into a few identifiable (and thus classifiable) choices rather than allowing him the freedom of nuance, is presumably not of concern to Mr Z, who has to worry mostly about his bottom line, but it should be of major concern to users of his services, who have varying motives. These variations are what makes literature different from laundry lists, and keeps secrets from Big Brother, but they, it seems to me, are equally important to a civilized society. Few things in life are more inspiring than a perfectly structured poem or a carefully reasoned essay, and few things are more important to my sense of individuality than my belief that I am entitled to keep certain secrets from the prying eyes of others. The standardized, analyzable tools we already have available (called words and language) give us the power to communicate in ways that are novel and inspiring as well as merely efficient. A string of emojis or a succession of boxes is unlikely to have such power. It would be like turning the library over from Melvil Dewey to Hallmark.
What prompts these observations is a recent attempt on my part to engage the Internal Revenue Service in a discussion about the clarity (or rather, lack of clarity) of certain instructions in their 1040 tax instructions. Specifically, while certain information about my age is requested on a worksheet, there is no clear instruction about whether or where or how to apply it, although the implication clearly is that it I am entitled to a special exemption if I was born before 2 January 1952. (You didn’t really need to know this detail, but more clarity always helps, in my opinion.) Since I do not have the patience to wait during the infuriating silence that follows the automated words : “Due to an unprecented number of calls …”, and the IRS, in its bureaucratic wisdom refuses to give me an e-mail address to which to direct my inquiry, I elected to pretend that I was such a Luddite that I had no access to the Internet, and I WROTE THEM A LETTER! An old-fashioned letter on a piece of paper. I typed it out and put it in an envelope with a stamp sent it by snail mail to the address of their office nearest to me.
In due course I received a reply. I have seldom seen a document so perfectly crafted to appear to respond to the question that prompted it and at the same time so opaque. It was something called a 1040X form, on which the taxpayer who has recognized a problem with his original 1040 is allowed to amend the previous version and recalculate his obligation, specifically relating each revision to a specified line of the original 1040 form. This was impossible for me, since the line to which it would have referred was exactly what was missing (it was on a worksheet. buried in the bowels of the pages and pages of helpful hints that accompanied the original form). So, I WROTE THEM A SECOND LETTER, using the file number their reply had given me explaining the difficulty and rephrasing my question.
This elicited another written reply from the IRS, which, instead of directly addressing the problem, reiterated the requirement that I identify the specific line on my original 1040 that I wanted to change, but all this was itself in the form of boxes to be checked and requests for “documentation”. Not Dear Sir, we are not clear what you want. Please elaborate. No. A box checked by my correspondent : Please provide documentation for the line(s) you are altering.
I chose to provide a scanned copy of my Army Discharge Certificate to prove my age, and I replied with still another snail-mail letter. The Reduction in Paper work Act was being egregiously violated. As of this writing I have not received an answer. I think I have created panic in the Kansas City office of the IRS by stepping outside the safe boundaries of boxes into the realm of actual writing. I suspect that since there is no little box saying “We don’t deal in words; we deal in boxes.” the diligent little cubicle chipmunks in Kansas City are flummoxed. They have forgotten how to use the language we as taxpayers have spent so much money on teaching them in our public school system. (That’s the one Betsy De Vos is busily attempting to do away with.). Without little boxes, they are stymied.
I am, too. I am tempted to put a lot of the blame on Marc Zuckerman, but that may be unfair. He didn’t invent emojis.
Addendum : I eventually received a check from the Treasury for an amount slightly different from what I had recalculated. There was no cover letter; just the check. Down in one corner, in small type, was the notation : “1040X 2016.” It was so small, bracketed by other small and esoteric numbers of significance only to the IRS, that I didn’t notice it at first. I was suspicious. A Treasury check with no explanation? Didn’t sound kosher. I wondered whether I was being set up for some sort of scam, such as “We made a mistake. Please cash the check and deposit the proceeds in the bank account shown below, and we will issue you a new one”, so I wrote still ANOTHER letter, including a copy of the check, asking what it was for. Turned out finally it was genuine and the discrepancy was a matter of the few dollars in interest that had accrued since 2016. I was eventually informed of this in a phone call from a very friendly gentleman who identified himself with a badge number, his full name and address, and (I think) the license plate number of his car. I had apparently finally exhausted their supply of little boxes. The solution would seem to be a box to be checked with the question : Would you be up for a conversation about this? Here’s my e-mail address and private phone number.
But little boxes are so much easier. I wish they were a little larger, so I could fit 😦 inside.
Vance Weaver 