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BITWASTES_FACECATS

                                             December 30, 2021

                                           BITWASTES

Categorization is Auerbach's central theme,
specifically the ways we categorize human beings
and human behavior, and how this interacts with
our computerized world, where extensive systems
of categorization are enabled by our technology,
and simultaneously enable the technology to do
many things, both good and bad.

Auerbach looks at how this plays out on various grounds,
for example:

    "... Facebook changed their list of gender choices
    from two to fifty-one in 2014, then subsequently added
    seven more (twenty more in the UK)"


    "Facebook originally forced users to select exclusively
    from this list, but subsequently let users type in
    whatever terms they want, though the interface strongly
    discourages doing so."

I appreciate hearing about things like this, myself, since
I've never used Facebook (and I think most Facebook people
implicitly assume that of course *everyone* is a Facebook
person, so they don't bother to explain things like this).

This sounds like a problem in the dating-website world that
I've seen addressed by letting anyone type in anything they
want as a "gender", but then afterwards that text field
of fuzzy data is scraped and there's an attempt at firming it
up into the more conventional categories where man-seeking-woman
is the typical case.

  Accounts claiming to be female get a lot of attention:
  the male accounts always out-number them, and if you're
  going to look for fradulent scammers, new female sign-ups
  are your best bet.


Auerbach continues:

   "By offering a strictly defined set ... of genders and
   mandating that every user choose one, Facebook ensures
   that its data analysis will be neat.  Without a default
   set, Facebook would be left with a long tail of rare,
   sometimes unique, and unstandardized genders.  That
   data would be messier and harder to analyze."


   "Facebook tried to accomodate an increasingly flexible gender
   taxonomy.  Computers are not terribly good with flexibility."

That's the kind of flat statement that gives me pause
about Auerbach.  It makes sense in context-- and yet
really, computers are just as good with flexibility as we
want them to be, but simple schemes of categorization of
human beings are desired by other human beings...

The issue with gender categorization is trying to accomdate
particular individuals that want a lot of flexibility,
when much of the world thinks in terms of just two slots.



   "... computers paradoxically enable us to revise and refine
   our categorization even as they insist that we continue to *make*
   those classifications.  To be described to a computer is to
   be described by labels.  To be described by labels is to make
   a *selection* from categories. ..."

Here "computers" are a short-hand for certain
social groups, and social pressures...

    When you take the masks off the machines,
    you find guys in tin-suits every time.







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