Paper Jams, Centaurs, Outsourced Brains and Doppelgängers
Thoughtful Net #56. Curated links from the past few weeks.
I think one of the problems I have with the ‘techlash’, and the ‘time well spent’ movement in particular, is that it presumes that everyone has the same experiences and objectives online. But when I see my wife keep in touch with her (our) family on the other side of the world, and I see the change that movements like #metoo are creating, I wonder what ‘time well spent’ actually means. As Maya Indira Ganesh said:
Migrants maintain family relationships across distance; entrepreneurs set up and manage businesses; millions are employed by digital apps and platforms; activists amplify their causes; marginalized people find community. Not spending time on these platforms is not a choice for many people.
OK, let’s have some links…
The Best
Why Paper Jams Persist. The science behind printer paper jams may not sound exciting, but Joshua Rothman has written here one of my all-time favourite articles since I started publishing this newsletter. We take for granted so many incredibly complex technologies.
[Paper jams are] a quintessential modern problem — a trivial consequence of an otherwise efficient technology that’s been made monumentally annoying by the scale on which that technology has been adopted.
Artificial Intelligence
Mr. Robot. A profile of Geoffrey Hinton, key player in the creation of neural networks and deep learning that are transforming our world. A remarkable man, with a remarkable story. By Katrina Onstad.
I think [AI is] going to make life a lot easier. The potential effects people talk about have nothing to do with the technology itself but have to do with how society is organized. Being a socialist, I feel that when the technology comes along that increases productivity, everyone should share in those gains.
How To Become A Centaur. Nicky Case makes the case (ha!) that artificial intelligence and tools for intelligence augmentation can combine to create a winning partnership.
Humans augmenting their own abilities [isn’t] anything new. We don’t have claws or fangs, so our ancestors augmented their physical abilities with spears and arrows. We don’t have large working memories, so our ancestors augmented their cognitive abilities with abacuses and writing. And these tools didn’t just make human lives easier — they completely changed how humans lived.
Are ‘you’ Just Inside Your Skin or Is Your Smartphone Part of You?. Exploring the legal ramifications of outsourcing brain functions to our smartphones. By Karina Vold.
No other piece of hardware in history, not even your brain, contains the quality or quantity of information held on your phone: it ‘knows’ whom you speak to, when you speak to them, what you said, where you have been, your purchases, photos, biometric data, even your notes to yourself — and all this dating back years.
Doing Better
The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger. Quinn Norton on context collapse and the third-party creation of artificial personalities on the internet.
Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots. But humanity is the most complicated thing we’ve found in the universe, and so far as we know, we’re the only thing even looking.
No One’s Coming. It’s Up to Us. Dan Hon on the derailed dream of a better future, and working out how to get it back on track. The railway metaphor is mine.
I’m born of a generation, I think, that was optimistic, if not utopian and our intentions were good, even while our knowledge or experience wasn’t yet mature. In that way, I consider myself a technologist: that we create technology to solve problems, and solving those problems is part of the way to a better society for ourselves and those who come after us.
Platforms
Silicon Valley’s Tax-avoiding, Job-killing, Soul-sucking Machine. Professor Scott Galloway makes the business case for the regulation — and possible break-up — of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
As Western nations become wealthier, organized religion plays a smaller role in our lives. But the void between questions and answers remains, creating an opportunity. As more and more people become alienated from traditional religion, we look to Google as our immediate, all-knowing oracle of answers from trivial to profound. Google is our modern-day god.
Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook — and the World. Facebook’s struggles with bad actors and abuse on their platform, and Mark Zuckerberg’s slow realisation that something needed to be done. By Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein.
Because of the company’s self-image, as well as its fear of regulation, Facebook tried never to favor one kind of news content over another. But neutrality is a choice in itself.
Culture
A Complete History of Happy-Slapping. I don’t know if this even makes sense outside of the UK, but happy-slapping was a mid-00s moral panic about phone-fueled violence. Angus Harrison traces its roots and investigates its veracity.
Happy-slapping was a meme before memes — the sharing of images, of an idea, from person to person, phone to phone. Yes, acts of violence ranging from playground bullying to brutal murders were filmed, but it was the early days of the camera phone that made this newsworthy–a time when filming everything was an emerging phenomenon, not a way of life.
The Lonely Life of a Professional YouTuber. Joe Zadeh profiles Will Lenney, a 20-year-old YouTube star.
“I’ve never loved anything as much as I love YouTube,” says Will. “But I have started to realise how it affects me. When one of my videos has a good first hour, I get so happy and sometimes I step back and think: ‘Hang on, these numbers on a screen are controlling my entire emotional state. F•ck, that’s dangerous.’”
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.
