Me, Narcissism, Sexism, Roman Emperors, and the Semantic Dream
Thoughtful Net #62: curated links from the past few weeks
A lot of the links in this edition relate to history. This wasn’t a conscious curatorial choice, or any great lapse into nostalgia, just a clustering of points from a biased data source (I’m a sucker for a well-written piece that relates history to modernity). But for the sake of thematic continuity, here’s a recording of a presentation I gave recently about history and technology and humans.
There’ll be more from me later. Or now, even.
I Wrote This
Why Every Company Is Making a Digital Assistant.
Why are big tech companies around the world working on their own digital assistant? Because the competition is for much more than your phone or smart speaker, it’s for the opportunity to be the touchpoint of your every digital interaction.
The controller of this context will be your digital assistant: a meta-operating-system across all the surfaces of your interactions with the internet. Your assistant will have the history of your behaviour and predict the future of your actions.
History
The Urge to Share News of Our Lives Is Neither New Nor Narcissistic .
Lee Humphreys on the history of social sharing, especially the diaries of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is going into a future presentation of mine.
We share our everyday experiences because it helps us to feel connected to others, and it always has. The urge to be present on social media is much more complex than simply narcissism. Social media of all kinds not only enable people to see their reflections, but to feel their connections as well.
How To Kill Your Tech Industry.
Post-World War II, Britain led the world in computing systems — heavily powered by female labour. But within 30 years, institutional sexism caused that lead to collapse. By Marie Hicks.
By the late 1960s, the government began to fear losing control of the machines that allowed the state to function because they did not have a well-trained, permanent, reliable core of technical experts. The women who had the technical skills were… seen as liminally working-class, temporary workers who should not rise above their current station.
Winning the War versus Winning the Peace.
James Allworth on Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with Roman Emperor Augustus, and drawing parallels with today’s Silicon Valley tech leaders.
In tech, it’s so hard to win, with so much competition, so many people watching, and with stakes are so high, that victors inside the industry don’t feel that it’s safe to put down their swords. But if they want to cement their position, it’s something they need to learn.
Other Stuff
Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
Sinclair Target on the original dream of the semantic web, readable by machines and humans, capable of the frictionless exchange of user data — and the reality of the compromised web we have today. I almost put this in the history section, but we’re still living through it.
The web has not only failed to become the Semantic Web but also threatened to recede as an idea altogether. We now hardly ever talk about “the web” and instead talk about “the internet”… some might still protest that they’re two different things, but the distinction gets less clear all the time.
The Dawn of Twitter and the Age of Awareness.
Clive Thompson on the way Twitter changed the way we communicated, from longer, infrequent, synchronous blogging to short, constant, streams of micro updates.
Each update was so short as to seem meaningless, if considered on its own. But that’s the thing: Their power was in the aggregate. Follow someone’s updates for weeks, months, or years and you’d develop a rich sense of that person’s internal life. It was like hearing them think out loud, all day long.
Franken-algorithms: the Deadly Consequences of Unpredictable Code.
On the complexity and accountability crisis facing machine learning: building algorithms that provide results we can no longer understand or explain. By Andrew Smith.
Some call this form of ability “artificial narrow intelligence”, but here the word “intelligent” is being used much as Facebook uses “friend” — to imply something safer and better understood than it is. Why? Because the machine has no context for what it’s doing and can’t do anything else.
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.
