https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes
'Netflix says that its new policy allows members of the same "household" to
share an account. This policy comes with an assumption: that there is a
commonly understood, universal meaning of "household," and that software can
determine who is and is not a member of your household.
This is a very old corporate delusion in the world of technology. In the early
2000s, I spent years trying to bring some balance to an effort at DVB, whose
digital television standards are used in most of the world (but not the USA)
when they rolled out CPCM, a DRM system that was supposed to limit
video-sharing to a single household.
Their term of art for this was the "authorized domain": a software-defined
family unit whose borders were privately negotiated by corporate executives
from media companies, broadcasters, tech and consumer electronics companies in
closed-door sessions all around the world, with no public minutes or
proceedings.
https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-iii-8561f6d5a4dc
These guys (they were nearly
all guys) were proud of how much "flexibility"
they'd built into their definition of "household." For example, if you owned a
houseboat, or a luxury car with seatback displays, or a summer villa in another
country, the Authorized Domain would be able to figure out how to get the video
onto all those screens.
But what about other kinds of families? I suggested that one of our test cases
should be a family based in Manila: where the dad travels to remote provinces
to do agricultural labor; the daughter is a nanny in California; and the son is
doing construction work in the UAE. This suggestion was roundly rejected as an
"edge case."
Of course, this isn't an
edge case. There are orders of magnitude more people
whose family looks like this than there are people whose family owns a villa in
another country. Owning a houseboat or a luxury car makes you an outlier.
Having an itinerant agricultural breadwinner in your family does
not.
But everyone who is in the room when a cartel draws up a standard definition of
what constitutes a household is almost certainly drawn from a pool that is more
likely to have a summer villa than a child doing domestic work or construction
labor half a world away. These weirdos, so dissimilar from the global majority,
get to define the boxes that computers will shove the rest of the world into.
If your family doesn't look like their family, that's tough: "Computer says
no."'
Via David.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
