Three Books: Reflections on the Perils of the Algorithm (Or Why The One Has An Analog Display)

It often gets asked why the One has an analog display when a digital one seems so — obvious?

We’re not anti-digital. That’d be a bit like being anti-breakfast. But there are good breakfasts and crappy breakfasts. And there are good ways to use digital technology, and crappy ways to use digital technology.

There are virtues and values imbued in technology based on the decisions made while designing. You make decisions about what your technology stands for, and what makes sense for the way the technology is to be used. It’s a bit like making decisions about what to eat for breakfast.

Decisions were made for the One. Sensors and MCUs on the inside. And an analog display on the outside.

Why an analog display when digital displays are the kids favorite vitamin-fortified, sugar-frosted breakfast cereal?

There are aesthetic reasons: Easier to read at a glance. It looks like it belongs on a bike. It’s circular, like your wheels (hopefully.) And it looks hella cool.

There are technical reasons: Better battery life means more time riding not worrying about battery life. Also, digital displays are honeypots for feature creep: you may think getting a notification of a KOM or phone call on your bike computer is a bonus feature. You may actually think that. And I’d be the last person to think any less of you for thinking that. (But an analog display without phone call or KOM notification is way hella cooler.)

There are ethical reasons: You spend 4–11(!) hours on average everyday staring at a digital screen — home, work, driving, standing. Every person with an idea for an App or website probably doesn’t think that they’re adding to those hours. They just think they have a good idea for an App. Or a website. That’s their ethics. But what would you think of us if we added another 2 hours a day to your screen time when we’re telling you to go ride your bike and listen to your thoughts and the birds, instead of swiping at your candy coated donut game or seeing if that damn Instagram egg has cracked open yet? What kind of people do you think we are, anyway, eh? (Also, an analog display looks hella cool. And getting a notification from the Algorithm while riding? It’s much less cool.)

One

10 Arguments to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now — Jaron Lanier

Many years ago I was doing the Jack Kerouac thing driving my way across the US for a year seeking whatever would be next. I found myself in Redwood City, California knocking on the door of VPL, the company Jaron Lanier started to develop the first generation of Virtual Reality.

I asked if Jaron had time for a chat. “Have a seat. He’s giving a demo so he may be busy, but let’s see.” I took a seat in the wood veneer paneled waiting area.

A few minutes later, the door over to the right swung open and these big dudes who could’ve been Navy SEALS if they weren’t Secret Service came through, gave me a stare that made me instinctively brace and immediately determined I — with my waist length dreadlocks and Patagonia pullover stinking of road trip car and patchouli — was not in any way a threat.

Jaron, shoeless, ambled in. He was yapping like a big, soprano teddy bear who had just swallowed helium. Who was listening? Al Gore, the U.S. Senator from Tennessee.

I wouldn’t get that chat with Jaron — U.S. Senators get priority, I suppose — but I did get caught up in his vision of VR and his implicit ethical musings that found its way into the VR research lab I worked at during grad school.

Now, decades later, he’s been in a reflective mode. He’s been considering the naivety that inspired the creation of this digitally connected world where behind every screen (or speaker or camera or microphone) is an algorithm incredibly efficient at modifying your behavior and possibly “turning you into an asshole” (his words) in incredibly pernicious ways.

The arguments won’t be a surprise to most anyone who’s paid attention to the malfeasance of the Five Horsemen of High Tech. Aside from deleting your social media accounts, if Jaron rode a bike, he may’ve offered that you should ride your bike more and listen to your own thoughts rather than those of the Algorithms of the Internet. Or the call of that Red Tailed Hawk that sailed above the hill you just climbed.

Two

CLOG: Artificial Intelligence — CLOG Editors

These days CLOG is my favorite quarterly journal. Each issue takes on a single topic and dives deep. The latest one focuses on Artificial Intelligence. Exciting. Intriguing. Nerve-wracking. Aside from the kind of AI you may see in the IBM commercial that’s meant to make the world better, there are the more anxiety-provoking ones that figure out that the normal, human brain may be as programmable as a puppy, to forever perform the tricks the Algorithm imbues it with, probably starting from the human’s infancy.

I don’t want to rain on everyone’s dot-com parade, but it seems to me that we should spend much less time playing with the Algorithm and more time playing with our fellow normal humans, unmediated by a bit of glass and those little plastic squares we bang on. (Or another reason to get on your bike, think your own thoughts, and forget about feeding the hungry databases of the Internet.)

Three

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — Nicholas Carr

Carr may be the forerunner to the general audience, long form argument about the way the internet’s algorithms have been running a number on us. It’s a readable history of the ways various “techniques” (Mumford) have shaped the conditions for knowing throughout the ages, leading into our current Internet episteme.

I keep saying “algorithm” like its a chair or letter opener or something. It’s the joke around my cycling clubhouse at this point — anytime anything bad happens, it’s “the algorithm’s” fault. But, really there are people and their institutions, and their ethics, and their political and economic systems that result in the algorithm. My main criticism would be that Carr could spend more time excavating those ethics and institutions, something that Shoshana Zuboff does (perhaps to excess) in “Surveillance Capitalism.” But, I’m only 12 millimeters through the Zuboff as of half-time. (If you’re intrigued, The Guardian has a solid review.)

All of this makes me wonder what the world will be like when there’s the Internet’s equivalent of organic food or something — when a movement arises similar to when it was realized that most processed food weren’t good for your mind, body and soul. What is an unprocessed, organic, locally-sourced internet?

Read More. Write More. Ride More.

OMATA