Tag Archives: Complexity

More than two sides, the complexity of a story

Posted on by

In a lot of my writing, I typically focus on one aspect of the story. For example, with my writing about Ferguson I really focused on the wrong that I believed the police were doing. I didn’t really touch on the violence that the protesters were doing to the community (contained to the first few days) or the violence they were committing on the police. I didn’t ignore it personally, or as I was thinking about the articles, I just didn’t want to discuss it because it didn’t fit with the story I was trying to outline. That’s perfectly fine. You can’t fit everything into any given story. However, that doesn’t mean that omission was support of the actions of the protesters. I abhor their behavior and I think that it really negatively impacted their message. 

The past few days, we’ve had some pretty serious leaks. Over 100 celebrities have had their nude images leaked. The suspected culprit is iCloud. The iPhone, like most Android phones have the option to automatically backup your photos to a storage unit online. Apparently, there was a vulnerability in an application called Find My Phone, which allowed a person to try as many times as they wanted to access an account. What this meant was that brute force methods for cracking a login for an account would work eventually. It might have taken days or longer for whatever algorithm was used to crack the logins, but eventually it would have worked. There’s no way for it not. Essentially, the approach would run through as many permutations as possible for the login. furthermore, it could have actually been run concurrently on multiple different systems to test in parallel. It’s pretty horrible that someone was able to sneak into iCloud and steal these pictures, however, it’s also incumbent on the users of these systems and the owners of the systems to ensure that these simple lapses don’t happen. 

The users of these services bare a responsibility for understanding what is happening to their data once it leaves their phones. This is a requirement for any user, not just the famous. The famous likely should have someone help them with their security features, as it’s unlikely that many of them have the desire or knowledge to do it on their own. Not that this is any different for much of the rest of the population. They are as vulnerable as the famous, but aren’t a target simply by being uninteresting. 

In both cases, it’s fully acceptable to be upset by both sides of the story. It’s not impossible to say that police violence and militarization is bad and that the criminal element of the Ferguson protests is bad too. It’s also fine to say that you shouldn’t hack and that the people that develop the systems and use the systems are accountable as well. In most of our stories, there are complexities that are withheld or ignored because there is an angle the writer is going for, the story would take too long, or the writer has a low opinion of the readers. In my case, I was going for a specific angle with the Ferguson stories, because I assumed that it was obvious to the reader that the violence committed by the protesters was both known and understood to be a terrible wrong. Not mentioning it did make the police seem less rational than they were behaving though.

In the case of the leaks, most of the attention has been put on the leaker and the people enjoying the leaks, however, it’s important that we keep in mind that there’s a responsibility of the companies to keep that data safe. 

Complexity and politics

Posted on by

I’ve been reading a book called “Rethinking the Fifth Discipline” which is something of a treatise on organizational theory and complexity. The Fifth Discipline, is about creating a learning organization. Where the organization has naturally built-in processes that encourage learning through challenging mental models. What’s that mean? Well, anytime we approach a problem we have our own set ideas about what’s right and wrong with the problem. This leads us to develop specific solutions based on that perspective. When working in an organization these frameworks, perspectives or mental models can lead to conflict. Developing a method of resolving differences in these mental models is paramount to allow a company to move forward.

One of the ways to resolve these differences is to expand everyone’s perspective of the problem. To allow some of the scope to expand to generate a bigger picture. In other words, allowing people to see the forest for the trees. We know that we have a dead tree in the middle of our forest, and our actions to get that tree out may have negative impact on the rest of the forest. If one of the solutions was to burn down the dead tree, there could be some serious implications to the rest of the forest if we did that without really thinking about it. Working to resolve the differences may highlight the fact that we’re in the middle of a drought right now and that burning that dead tree would likely cause the entire forest to go up. This of course would be the worst thing we could do.

This way of viewing problems has several names, including complexity theory and systemic thinking. I believe that we have a serious lack of system thinking in our government today. There are two areas that have struck me as the most obvious and these involve the courts. The first is the continued assault on women’s rights in many different states. These state governments are slowly picking at pieces of reproductive rights of women when choosing to have an abortion or not. In some cases, the ruling is extremely narrow and seems to intentionally avoid looking at the full system of problems. The one shining light example against this is the ruling that has kept open a clinic in Mississippi. The judge realized that if this law was allowed to stand it would have closed the only legal clinic for abortions.

The other area that is a cause for concern is the recent PA ruling on Voter ID requirements. While on the face it seems like it’s fairly straight forward. I mean why shouldn’t there be a law requiring you to show a proper state ID, but then why isn’t a voter registration card considered a valid ID? Couldn’t this resolve the issue? The other factor that doesn’t seem to be considered, is the systemic efforts to make it more difficult to acquire state ID throughout the country, such as Wisconsin closing DMV locations or reducing hours – by the way Wisconsin’s voter ID law was ruled unconstitutional.

Through taking a systemic view the efforts in total indicate an effort to reduce or control the ability of the electorate to vote. While the law itself may make sense on the surface, viewing the entire system displays the total efforts and would indicate that a different ruling should be considered. This is the similar type of issue that there is with the Citizen’s United ruling. With a very narrow focus and inability to look at the full system a ruling that has dramatically changed our political landscape is seen to make a great deal of sense.