Chris Peterson

Suppose you go to the movies. You buy a gallon bag of popcorn for $5. Your twin also pays $5, but she receives her popcorn in four sealed quart bags. You are both equally hungry, have equivalent stomachs, and have the same love for salty treats during showings of Up. Will you both eat the same amount of popcorn?

Probably not. At least, that’s the answer suggested by the behavioral economist Dilip Soman. I subscribe to the podcast Arming the Donkeys by Dan Ariely. On last week’s show, Dan interviewed Dilip about “The Effect of Bracketing on Spending“, cowritten with Amar Cheema.

The basic finding of Soman and Cheema is this: portions affect consumption. Nothing new to dietitians, perhaps, but definitely new to economists. Soman explains that, ceteris paribus, your twin will eat less than you, because putting the same amount of popcorn into different bags creates “brackets” that contextualize consumption. There’s nothing to stop you from eating all of the giant tub of popcorn, but the tiny barrier of opening the bag makes you think about how much you are eating and gives you the chance to reevaluate your total consumption.

Soman and Cheema found the same effect held true with gambling. Roughly speaking, give a gambler an envelope with $X, or give them 10 envelopes each containing a tenth of $X, and they will gamble differently. According to Cheema, partitioning this way can reduce spending by 50%.

Now, what on earth does this have to do with my bank?

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Germany’s major carrier Lufthansa became the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack…The attack was initiated by Andreas-Thomas Vogel, an activist and website administrator for the Libertad, an advocacy group criticizing as “inhumane” Lufthansa’s policy of letting the police use its planes for the forced deportation of asylum seekers. On June 20, 2001, Vogel called for Internet users to participate in what he claimed to be an “online demonstration.” He released software that systematically contacted the website of Lufthansa and flooded the company’s web server with messages, forcing it to shut down. According to Lufthansa lawyers and Human Rights organizations, Lufthansa registered about 1.2 million hits that day, which originated from some 13,000 computers.

I’m currently doing some work on cyberaggression for Urs Gasser at the Berkman Center. The Vogel case – quoted above – would seem to be a textbook example of malicious online aggression: a number of users, acting in concert, overwhelm the web servers of a foe until the site shuts down. As far as I can tell, it is a textbook distributed denial of service attack, with the one rather noteworthy exception that instead of hiring out a botnet for an hour or so Vogel actually got real people to run the software.

So here is the question: should we treat Vogel like a ruthless criminal or like a virtuous activist? Or, in other words, was the Lufthansa DDoS more like blackmail (Vogel was charged with coercion) or more like a sit-in?

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Re-reading Marshall’s article, there is one clarification I want to make. After quoting me saying that Facebook information is decontextualized (as danah boyd has exhaustively noted), Marshall writes:

Perhaps no longer! The new Facebook publishing feature lets users share things with just a particular list of their friends. (Or with the public at large if they so choose.) The contexts are un-collapsed. Communication is human again. That’s a very big deal and is the kind of change that could make far more people comfortable sharing far more information about their lives on Facebook. It’s also a feature that no major competitor (namely Twitter) offers.

I share his hope, but I am not sure that the Publisher by itself reconstructs contexts. Certainly, it is a powerful tool with which one may take steps to rebuild the walls that separate social situations.

However, the tool itself doesn’t help much if it is to be exercised in an unhelpful environment. As I wrote on page 52 of my paper:

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Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb (syndicated to the New York Times) had a great article about Facebook privacy today that incorporated some stuff from my thesis/working paper. Marshall was nice enough to contact me before he ran the article to ask what I thought about the new Facebook Publisher.

Basically, Facebook is introducing a new Publisher that gives people easier access to (and more granularity over) what they publish to whom. While I don’t have access to the new Publisher yet, here’s what I told Marshall yesterday:

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Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School was kind enough to give my Facebook working paper a shoutout on his blog. In case you haven’t read it, his article on Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy (forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review) is probably the best work done in this field thus far.

He’s a swell guy who has been very helpful orienting me in academic space and teaching me fun new words like desuetude, which is really the point of an intellectual mentor anyway.

Today I coauthored a short essay/blog post entitled What’s In A (User) Name? Facebook’s Contribution to Online Dispute Creation with Professor Ethan Katsh of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. It’s a short piece which briefly describes some of the potential benefits and drawbacks of the new Facebook Username system from an online dispute resolution perspective.

Since my buddy Matt has been so successful I figured I’d give this a try. I’ll flesh it out a bit more soon.