Democracy, Attention, Intimacy with Assistants, and Social Media Tax
Thoughtful Net #63: curated links from the past few weeks
Woo-hoo! Two editions in the same month. This hasn’t happened since March, which kind of contradicts the “more than monthly” part of the footer copy.
I’m struggling to write an introduction for this, so let’s just get on with it.
The Best
The War Between Technology & Democracy.
This piece by Jamie Bartlett articulates the challenges created by the impact of new technology on established social norms in a way that very few people have managed to do. I bought a copy of his book, The People vs Tech after reading this.
All the recent stories of bots, trolls, hacking, crypto, stolen data, are viewed in isolation, rather than symptoms of a much bigger problem we are facing. That bigger problem is the following: we have an analogue democracy and a new norm of digital technology. And the two don’t work very well together.
Living with Technology
How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin.
A collected sequence of tweets by Venkatesh Rao (that would ideally be written up as a blog post) that occasionally veers towards inscrutability but is notable for being one of the few pieces I’ve read that really understands our information environment.
What the “unplug for self-care” crowd doesn’t get is that you are part of a giant social computer computing the future. The level and latency at which you consume information and bet on it determines your “job” in the social computer. Your shitposting and FOMO are functional.
Is Social Media Good or Bad for Us? Yes.
Reid Hoffman is the founder of a social network (LinkedIn) so you can take some of this with a certain degree of skepticism, but I like some of the pragmatic thinking in how we navigate the world of multi-billion user social networks.
Let’s remember the original vision of social media: An open society where people are more connected, and where diverse voices can be heard. Early social media was like this: suddenly many people were finding a space to speak in a new open land. Now that land has become a massive city, and so realizing that vision will take more hard work.
Why You Can’t Stop Looking at Other People’s Screens.
By John Herrman. I’m a practitioner of looking over people’s shoulders to see what they’re doing on their phones — not the detail, I’m not a gossip, I’m just fascinated by seeing the multitudes of activities that people do when they’re ‘staring at their phones’.
Other people’s screens are works in progress: they are tense and short texts with no context, typed and retyped, and then, for those underground, sent at the next stop; they are extraordinarily long messages; they are selfies getting touched up, and then discarded; they are seemingly infinite group message chains full of religious affirmations; they are work emails with a lot of talk about clients, and the client, and our client, because the train is a place of work now, just like the office, just like the home.
Emerging Technologies
Alexa, Should We Trust You?.
Really lovely and interesting in-depth reporting by Judith Shulevitz on our relationships with voice assistants, how we respond to them, personalise them, and act intimately with them.
Gifted with the once uniquely human power of speech, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri have already become greater than the sum of their parts. They’re software, but they’re more than that, just as human consciousness is an effect of neurons and synapses but is more than that. Their speech makes us treat them as if they had a mind.
The Problem with Facebook and Virtual Reality.
I’m a fan of virtual reality, and I believe it provides an incredible feeling of place and immersion that’s hard to match, but it’s also isolating — and I think that’s a problem that means it won’t become mainstream. Ben Thompson thinks likewise, and can’t understand how it fits Facebook’s plans.
Devices intended to augment life, not replace it, have always been more compelling: every moment one is awake is worth addressing. In other words, the virtual reality market is fundamentally constrained by its very nature: because it is about the temporary exit from real life, not the addition to it, there simply isn’t nearly as much room for virtual reality as there is for any number of other tech products.
Outside the Western Bubble
If You Charge People to Tweet, They’ll Revolt in the Street.
Uganda’s government recently introduced a tax on social media, ostensibly to stop the spread of falsehoods but also to prevent online dissent. Molly Schwartz interviews some people affected by the tax.
For the people in Uganda living under the tax, there’s been an interesting temporal collapse. Some have grown up with access to internet, but many Ugandans have just gotten access to the internet in the last few years. People are experiencing the cyber-utopianism of the dawn of social media at the same time as the current wave of techno-criticism. It’s the rise and fall of the Facebook empire, packed into a Cliff’s Notes version.
This Election Offered A Window Into WhatsApp’s Wild, Sometimes Fact-Free World.
Ryan Broderick’s article about WhatsApp use in Brazil was written before the (disastrous) result of the recent elections but indicates the scale of the problem of fact-checking messages shared in closed social networks.
Due to WhatsApp’s encrypted messaging structure and the peer-to-peer nature of it, it’s impossible to know what people are sharing or how frequently. But if a WhatsApp monitor built by local fact-checking group Eleições Sem Fake is any indication, it looks just as overrun with misinformation as Facebook is.
One More Thing
The Virtual Vloggers Taking Over YouTube.
This isn’t a particularly notable piece of writing, but I’m fascinated by the subject — I have some scattered thoughts about the future of digital avatars which I’m trying to make into a cogent argument, because I think their use will be increasingly prevalent. By Bryan Lufkin.
There’s a unique quality to the content that virtual YouTubers offer… it isn’t directly tethered to the problems of a real individual or identity. It’s got the intrigue of character writing with the lackadaisical feel of live, organic, self-driven content.
The Thoughtful Net is an occasional (less than weekly, more than monthly) publication collecting great writing about the internet and technology, culture, information, society, science, and philosophy. If you prefer to receive it in your inbox you can follow this publication or subscribe to the email newsletter.
