[Reader-list] Profiling

[Are Flagan]

The below moves on to a specific software angle after two paragraphs. Has
anyone got similar experiences or thoughts?

-af

+ + + + + 

Profiling software

Profiling on racial or ethnic grounds has long been a contentious issue.
After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, however, it appears that
the practice of singling out a certain demographic for special treatment,
with a strong negative prefix, has reentered as an unequivocally necessary
and good practice. After all, the reasonable argument goes, the hijackers
and the sponsoring terrorist cells were all Arabs, so surely it makes
perfect, and legitimate, sense to take extra precautions when dealing with
people of Middle Eastern descent, especially Muslims. And so it has come to
pass that anyone named after the Prophet or with a golden complexion, not to
mention a foreign passport from one of select countries, has been taken
aside to have their individuality stripped in favor of a generalized figure
associated with all evil, or any other expression of apocalyptic mayhem that
you may care to fear. One size fits all when the profile matches.

African Americans are of course no strangers to profiling in the name of
security, justice and peace. Ever since the chains of slavery were revoked
and civil rights were granted (by the white masters), they have been
enslaved in a stereotype of criminal activity that law enforcement has
pushed vigorously to enforce. True, the majority of the prison population in
the US, some 2 million people, is non-white, but we are not encouraged to
see this as the effect of poverty, legislation (like the 3-strikes law), and
the targeting of specific communities. Instead it is considered a behavioral
question of race and ethnicity, physiognomy and genes. Yes, let us
completely ignore the obvious fact that incarceration is a social safety
valve and that it primarily removes the elements likely to threaten the
distribution of wealth and power through its precarious ideological balance.
And this is why any black man in the US is presumed guilty until proven
innocent. Or, as US Attorney General John Ashcroft kindly remarked about the
profile macthes held at Camp X-Ray: they are, in his view, considered guilty
even after proven innocent and are never to be released.* The profile has
now become destiny and any intent prescribed by it has become synonymous
with presupposed actions, even if a subject has not committed them and has
no inclination or conviction to ever do so.

So why was profiling considered controversial in the first place? One
element is the social contexts alluded to already; profiles perpetuate
larger injustices and can therefore never be considered legitimate causes,
just symptoms of what they essentially cover up. As such, they are
mechanisms of oppression that work contrary to the purposes they advocate,
very literally protecting and serving, to invoke the policing motto, certain
values at the expense of others. More importantly, however, is the
historical legacy of profiling, which leads directly back to the discredited
nineteenth century sciences of Eugenics and Phrenology. The normative
argument constructed by these discourses anchored desirable as well as
unwanted characteristics in averaged appearances. Hence questions of race
were linked to the future of the species and smaller idiosyncrasies
advertised criminal acts. If you happened to have a big nose, for example,
you may be predisposed to take a life and should preferably be removed from
society before your heinous act was committed. Eugenics, meaning ³good at
birth,² accompanied this as a program of social engineering, accomplished
through selective breeding. (You may insert the many current debates around
The Human Genome Project here.) While these scientific attempts at
inscribing behavior in physiognomy eventually succumbed to other paradigms,
as they exclude individual differences, free will and even cultural
influences in favor of a strict biological determinism, their agenda of
presuppositions are essentially furthered in the current practice of
profiling.

I use profiles every day. Software profiles, that is. To make various
devices and peripherals converse, I have spent many hours calibrating and
profiling them to ensure appropriate translations of my perceptions. A
program like Adobe Photoshop conveniently demands profiles for just about
everything, and I consider this one of its greatest features. The first
thing I do after application launch is to set the correct working space and
profile assignments. When I open and save files, I am prompted with the
question of what profile to attach, if there is none, or informed that it
differs from the working space, in which case I may have to decide on a
conversion or perhaps stick to the original. Basically, any image that will
migrate beyond my desktop, and not end up on the Web, depends on an embedded
profile to maintain its integrity, that is to say my intent.

But first the monitor needs a profile to achieve that WYSIWYG match for the
workflow. This is roughly done with another software utility, like the
largely defunct Adobe Gamma, or any of the fancy devices that attach to the
screen for automatic adjustment of each CRT ray gun and thereby replace my
suspect eye with accurate measures. Next is the scanner, where IT 8
calibration reads the values off a colorful target, one for transparencies
and one for reflective materials, and matches each exactly to a referenced
text file of numeric data loaded into memory. The printer, to complete the
entire process, is somewhat harder to profile. Some software, like Monaco EZ
Color, does this by simply scanning a print, but the best and certainly the
most expensive way, since the gadget involved costs thousands of dollars (I
have held one once, carefully), is to acquire a dedicated densitometer and
read individual values off a printed target at software prompts. For the
printer, a profile for each type of paper and ink used is usually needed.
Once all this is done and assigned correctly, an image or negative placed on
the profiled scanner will be displayed correctly on the profiled monitor and
print with the right density, contrast and color balance on the profiled
printer. Profiles, in other words, essentially work as device dependent
preference files for a corrected and adaptable vision.

Photoshop consequently depends on profiles for the image workflow to make
sense. Without profiles, I would scan until I got sick of it and then adjust
the data, with a quality loss, until the monitor view came close. Should I
be lucky enough to only work on one particular system, avoiding the WYSIWYG
mismatch between what I saw and what someone else is seeing, I would most
likely waste a lot of paper and ink to get the print right. After exhausting
the canned profiles, shipped with the printer, that never match, the
remaining option is to adjust the image itself, blindly bending color curves
for an effect I have to visualize and then proof repeatedly. So I embrace
profiles to manage my colors and keep the gamut within the range accepted as
natural and normal. Without them, data would repeatedly lose its reference
points with each appearance, in each device, and degenerate into the chaos
that defies my recognition of what is proper. Profiles are my calibrated
points of navigation that prevents this decline.

The real beauty, although you can¹t see it, of applying various prefab
profiles within Photoshop rests on the fact that they are invisible. 20% dot
gain, to pick one setting, applied to an image objectively only results in a
lighter image when the file rips to film, on the screen it looks exactly as
it should. Profiles essentially do not really change anything, Photoshop
asserts, they simply maintain your vision and translate it with 20/20
results (through 20% dot gain, for example) to the intended output. Now this
is priceless of course. Who would not cherish profiles that work in the
background to ensure that you get what you want, from what you see, without
suffering any distortions in what you are looking at? Whatever changes are
made, they only survive as a hidden addendum to the image file until they
are called upon to preserve the integrity of the file, as you visualized it,
and not as an imagesetter, for example, may wish to interpret it.
Calibration coupled with the use of profiles consequently ensures that one
point of view is preserved according to set standards, throughout various
settings, in different contexts.

Software tells me, then, that profiles are necessary and desirable; thanks
to the way they help various devices to interpret data packets, according to
intent. But when someone passes through a metal detector at a port of entry
and is pulled aside for intimate screening, it is because he or she has just
had a profile attached to them, assigned by the local ³device² that
interprets their demographic this way. Sure, software profiles put the
packets in circulation from a central command, like the Colorsync or
Photoshop color settings, but these profiles where proofed on the relevant
devices before they were distributed to ensure collaboration, much like any
visa policy really. Profiling works in the background to facilitate
decisions on entry when packets travel port to port across borders of
difference. And profiles very explicitly invite many more such analogies,
labored or not, precisely because they are instruments of conversion that
always return to the currency they carry. This leads to the thought that
persistently haunts me; that profiles explains why the world makes some
sense at all, how evil divides itself from good, black from white, religions
from each other, one country from the next and so on. They are the
troublesome and comforting ideological supplements that I carry around as
inevitable baggage in return for knowledge and perception, those largely
cerebral turns toward understanding and recognition. Profiles hence allow my
views to converse across divides by putting the general before the specific,
ideology before the individual. Through them the calibrated and manufactured
impressions that encourages me to see a criminal in every black man, a
terrorist in every Arab and white as the holy source of light take root.
Profiles are my hidden supplements to a point of view, and I honestly swear
by them. Software profiles, that is.

* (Four aid workers from Kuwait caught in the dragnet have, I believe, gone
home, more than a year after they were ³captured.²)