On confidentiality and the present forum

When I started work at Google, I signed a confidentiality agreement, as is standard at technology companies. So, of course, I now know all sorts of juicy internal Google stuff that I cannot share here, which is mildly frustrating but both obvious and expected.

What's less obvious, to me, is what I can write about. Google has an official corporate blogging policy, but it basically amounts to "don't transmit confidential information and don't tarnish Google's reputation". Now, reputation's pretty easy: reasonable people must realize that all organizations sometimes hire nutballs like me, and that therefore any random insane or obnoxious thing I say is not endorsed by Google.

However, confidentiality's a trickier matter. If I write about technology at all, then I have to do it in a way that conveys no information to the reader about confidential matters. What does that mean?

One interpretation would be that I can write about anything in technology, except when it's related to what I do at Google. But, of course, over time, that would actually reveal what I work on at Google. If I write about many topics in computing technology, but not X, then over time it becomes increasingly likely that I'm working on X, particularly if some big X-related news item comes down the pipe and I remain conspicuously silent.

(Well, lately I've been rather silent for no particular reason --- pondering my confidentiality agreement is part of it, but I also just haven't felt much like writing. But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that my posting picks up again.)

Another interpretation would be that I can't write about technology at all. In my opinion, that's not reasonable. It would be absurd for Google to ask its employees to stop thinking, speaking, and acting on technology-related issues, particularly issues related to public policy. Regardless of my source of employment, I still live in a democracy (for the time being), and therefore have both a right and a civic responsibility to participate in the public sphere. I'm assuming that Google doesn't expect its employees to forego that.

On the other hand, in a world of at-will employment, I could in principle be fired for being a good citizen. I guess I'm just betting Google won't do that.

Anyway, I could probably second-guess this forever, but at some point I have to drive a stake in the ground. So, be advised:

• If I post about X, you cannot infer that I work on anything related to X at Google, or that Google is planning to do something about X.
• If I post about X, you cannot infer that I do not work on anything related to X at Google, or that Google is not planning to do something about X.
• Anything I post here reflects my own thinking, on my own time, drawing on information that is publicly available from communication outside of any confidentiality agreement with Google, and does not reflect the existence of any Google policy, product, or snack food.

Anyway, hopefully you get the picture.

As a side note, you often hear Hayekian apologists for capitalism talk about how the market's price signals are a magnificent mechanism for aggregating information from decentralized actors. But every seriously competitive and innovative market is rife with confidentiality agreements like the one I recently signed. Price signals seem like a crude and low-bandwidth interface to such an enormous wealth of information. Astonishing amounts of knowledge gets locked up in these mile-high vertical silos, and price signals are little dime-size spigots screwed onto the bottom of each silo.

I'm not a communist. Communism was about abolishing the price signal interface. I'm a post-capitalist: I believe there must be better, richer interfaces waiting to be discovered.

I suppose you could argue that contracts already enrich the economic interface a great deal. With contracts, an economic transaction's no longer an exchange of a sum of dollars for a physical good, but rather an exchange of arbitrarily negotiable bundles of rights.

But somehow, despite that flexibility, we still end up with enormous amounts of information locked up in silos. This cannot possibly be the best way to organize information production. Academia and open source software do better in at least one way: when someone publishes a scientific result, or writes a patch for an open source project, that information gets distributed to everyone, not just the people living inside some confidentiality wall. The entire universe of potential cooperators immediately receives a richly informative broadcast of the innovation, not just a 3-tuple consisting of a scalar value and two names ("$4.95", "Alice", "Bob").

However, for a variety of complicated reasons, proprietary software companies do seem to produce certain kinds of research and software that wouldn't get made in academia or the open source world.

So, I don't really know what the answer is. I have a copy of Benkler's Wealth of Networks somewhere in my huge, freshly unpacked mound of books. I suppose I should read it.

In which I acquiesce to the siren song of capitalism

OK, I suppose some disclosure is in order. I recently accepted the offer of a software development position at Google.

Provided I defend as planned this summer (hardly a foregone conclusion, but my advisor seems to believe in me), this fall I'll be ending my career in academia and moving to the Bay Area.

At this point it is worth noting that if I were smarter, more talented, more focused, or simply hungrier, I would probably have done as most other recent Ph.D.'s from my research group have done, and obtained an academic job, or at least joined a research lab. I'm reminded of the time I chewed out Jonah Goldberg for implying that liberals become academics because they can't get jobs in the private sector. In computer science, the opposite's closer to the truth. (Well, I did have one academic job offer, but for various reasons I turned it down. I also turned down a few interviews, mostly because I'd concluded that I wouldn't accept those positions even if they were offered.)

Not that I'm complaining. There are worse things in life than getting a job offer that 99% of the people in my profession would kill to have.

Finally, you may wonder how this affects my blogging. Well, in my previous post, I took a position that tilts against one of Google's most prominent current lobbying efforts. That doesn't really settle the issue, of course --- especially since the mechanics of options dictate that I want GOOG to drop as much as possible before I start work, and rise to stratospheric heights only thereafter --- but anyway I hope that my opinions will remain independent of my paycheck, even after I shuffle off this academic coil.

I won't take it personally, however, if you consider me a wholly owned subsidiary of my putative future employer.

Brand new/you're retro

Recent late-night IM conversation...

Retro-meta-blogging

Warning: navel-gazing metablogging ahead. Skip if you value your time.

Grrlscientist has suggested that I participate in a meme wherein one finds the 23rd post on one's blog and posts the 5th sentence. Although I am not a huge fan of blog-memes in general, I'm game for this one, mostly because it provides an excuse to clear out some other metablogging that's been sitting in my drafts for some time. So, to wit...

• First metablogging item: Here's the 23rd post on this blog, and as you can see it has only two sentences. Hey, that was easy. Perhaps it's slightly more interesting to note that this blog started out as a link blog --- basically, a way of cleaning out my web browser's enormous bookmark file --- as inspection of the first two weeks will reveal. My narcissistic love/hate relationship with my own inner voice soon prevailed, however, and I started writing longer, essaylike entries. And now that I've started using del.icio.us, I rarely post bare links at all. I suppose there's some kind of nugget of wisdom in there about the relationship between a medium of expression and its technological context and so on, but I'm too busy staring at my navel right now to conjure up anything thoughtful to say.

• Second metablogging item: Speaking of del.icio.us, you will notice that this blog's sidebar now contains not only a link to my del.icio.us page, but excerpts from one of my del.icio.us tags, specifically music-recommendations. This list is courtesy of the very cool, highly customizable linkrolls feature of del.icio.us, which I recommend heartily to anybody with both a website (bloggish or non-) and a del.icio.us account.

  (Incidentally, my music-recommendations are exactly that: music I recommend because I think it's truly excellent. If you feel like snooping around in all the music I've bought recently, then you might poke your nose into my musiclog. Obviously, when I buy music, it's because I enjoy it (yay for emusic.com and its streaming music samples), but not all such music is good enough that I'd single it out for public approval.)

  (Anybody curious about my reading habits may also wish to consider my booklog. Actually, I doubt anybody's curious about my reading habits, but I do think that people might want to copy this model of del.icio.us usage.)

• Third metablogging item: Wampum's posted a long list of potential nominees for the 2005 Koufax Awards' lefty blogs "Most Deserving of Wider Recognition" award. Almost 300 blogs! Hours of procrastination fodder! As it happens, this blog made the list. However, as my handful of regular readers know, I have a pretty ambivalent relationship to attention, so I'm not in any way encouraging people to nominate this blog for said award.

• Final metablogging item: I recently discovered, much to my amazement/chagrin, that BlogPulse's top 25 posts of 2005 included my post about Intelligent Design (though they got the permalink slightly wrong). Um, right. I have no clue what BlogPulse's criteria were, but I will say that spleen appears to sell. But then, I already knew that.

NYC log

Got 30 concentrated hours of mostly solitary NYC auto-tourism this past weekend. My Sept. 11-12 travelogue follows. Obvious warning: if you're not one of my friends and have somehow wandered onto this blog for some other reason, the following will, no doubt, be incredibly boring; actually, even if you are one of my friends, the following might still be incredibly boring.

The day begins with a noonish bus into the Port Authority terminal; I descend to the 7 train crosstown to the 5, uptown to 86th. I walk to Tal Bagels on 86 St. between 1st and 2nd. Poppy seed w/ lox spread + Lemon Snapple = my poisons of choice; eaten on steps of the Met while watching street musician, passers-by, and obnoxious pigeons. The Metropolitan's current exhibitions look snoringly dull, so I follow my prior plan to visit the Whitney: a great Ed Ruscha show, a mixed Ana Mendieta show, some semi-interesting Pop Art selections from the permanent collection.

Next I meander indirectly back to a 6 station and ride downtown to City Hall, to visit Ground Zero, which, for various ill-defined emotional reasons, I have been mostly avoiding the past three years. I pass St. Paul's, where a number of uniformed men accompanied by families are entering the memorial service. I heard that the PATH terminal was up and running, but it's still a shock to see the shiny new steps, sprouting directly out of the site, and leading down to the fully functional train station. The site's been cleaned up, and now bears the signs of incipient construction, but nevertheless still feels like a field of ruins. Green brush has started growing out of the mound of earth and gravel by the slurry wall. The viewing fence has been decorated by the city agencies with: tasteful and informative historical poster boards, plus small, iconic, utilitarian placards: "Please do not write on the fence," "Please understand that all items left must be cleaned up." The fence has been decorated by private citizens with: pictures, posters with lists of names, and numerous flowers, the last of these affixed by their stems, poked or sometimes woven between the narrowly spaced fence struts. I nearly bump (literally, physically bump) into Pataki as he walks out of Essex World Cafe by the corner of Liberty St. & Trinity Pl.; I back off in order to avoid alarming his security detail, although this security detail doesn't actually seem too worried about the surrounding crowd. I watch him glad-handle his way through the crowd for a while before I move on, past Ladder Co. 10 FDNY station (like most NYC stations today, a wreath hangs inside the door). I take the steps to the elevated pedestrian walkway, gawk for a while at the procession of uniformed men and accompanying families circulating through the pit, and move on.

Organized or disorganized groups at the site include: Falun Gong protesters, who, for unclear reasons, are out in force all over the city today; nut case with array of cardboard signs explaining that he and the CIA knew about 9/11 in the 1970s (I speculate that this is roughly when he started dropping lots of acid); a large crowd gathered about a solemn trio (one Asian woman, a middle-aged white woman, a taller white man with a thick graying beard) who read aloud sequentially from a book containing capsule biographies of each victim; a platoon of people (leftists? right-wingers? can't tell, though they're mostly young) wearing STOP TERRORISM t-shirts; a mysterious, vaguely funerary procession of women, who wear black gypsyish dresses and are led by a man beating a small drum; a small group of Japanese who have spread out long cloths painted with a manga-ish cartoon Buddha and some writing about Hiroshima, which they seem to be invoking in a spirit of genuine sympathy for tragedy, rather than to embarrass Americans by stirring up guilty associations.

I wander down Fulton St. to South St. Seaport. On the way, I encounter more Falun Gong protesters camped in front of NYU's Water St. residence. I sit on the pier and watch the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge for a little while. Then I get restless once again and wander up to the Chambers St. A/C station; I ride the train to Canal St. Along the way, I fire up my Karma and listen to the Velvets singing about heroin as I walk up through Chinatown, SoHo/NoLiTa, past Haring's Pop Shop, and into the East Village, wondering if Lou Reed ever imagined that these neighborhoods would look the way they do today. I get a double medium latte at Oren's (which, incidentally, still serves better coffee than I've had anywhere in Espresso City) and sit in Washington Square Park reading American Ground for a couple of hours. The relentlessly sobering content is leavened somewhat by the inevitable presence of musicians and NYU students around me.

Dinner: burger and fries at Cozy Soup & Burger (In-N-Out can kiss our collective New York ass). Around this point, I've just about had my fill of solitary wandering; you can cover a lot of ground when you're by yourself, but New York gets to be a lonely city when you don't know anyone. Fortunately, I do. I get a chocolate shake to go, then L-train into Williamsburg for PM and JW's opening party. Nice show. It goes about as well for me as parties ever go: I'm hardly a party person, but I manage to reconnect with old friends, and meet some new people. Most unexpected compliment of the night: S: "You're everything we're looking for." Me: "'We'?" S: "Women." If I were prone to blushing . . . of course, it's a polite lie, but flattery will get you everywhere (to an extent that you wouldn't even believe: see Fogg and Nass, IJHCS 46(5)). Bless you, S., wherever you are.

Party winds down around 4am. I crash on the couch with PM & JW's affectionate/needy champagne half-Burmese curled around my shoulder, his head tucked in the crook of my neck, and awaken sometime in the early afternoon, my (black) shirt covered in (beige) cat hair. My gracious hosts serve me a sesame bagel crammed with a shmear of cream cheese and a fistful of lox. We brunch; I feed bits of leftover lox to the half-Burmese and, eventually, the other cat as well; this offering buys me further love from the half-Burmese, and perhaps an infinitesimal reduction in contempt from The Other One. I help my hosts clean up, walk around Williamsburg a bit, then L-train back to 14th St. & 8th Ave. I walk up through Chelsea and into Hell's Kitchen, enjoying the gorgeous day, and enter the Port Authority. And thus ends my day of semi-homecoming.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.