The artisanal internet, life with technology, and Russian Doll
Thoughtful Net #68: curated links from the past few weeks
I don’t know quite how this happened, but I appear to have forgotten to publish this edition. I wrote the content below over six weeks ago, and was just preparing to write a new edition when I realised that I hadn’t sent this one yet. Ugh. I’m getting old. Charles Arthur’s The Overspill recently celebrated it’s 1000th issue. He (usually) posts five times a week. I bet he’s never forgotten to send one.
Wow, I’m embarrassed. Anyway, expect another email very soon.
The Best
The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet, Nitasha Tiku.
Abuses of power, or just plain irresponsibility, from big tech platforms has some people calling for a ‘slow web’ — a return to blogs, email newsletters (ahem), and community boards. But can we really go back?
There’s a fair chance that the artisanal internet could become the digital equivalent of organic food: more expensive, hard to find, and catering to a small group of relatively well-heeled people — deepening existing digital divides. Privacy has become a premium product and the teens who spend more time on Facebook tend to be lower-income and black.
Life with Technology
When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online, Taylor Lorenz.
Proud parents like to document the lives of their children on social platforms and blogs — known as sharenting. But what happens when the children find out about their unasked-for digital presence?
We thought it was so cool that we had pics of ourselves online. We would brag like, ‘I have this many pics of myself on the internet.’ You look yourself up, and it’s like, ‘Whoa, it’s you!’ We were all shocked when we realized we were out there. We were like, ‘Whoa, we’re real people.’
“Russian Doll” Is Better At Video Game Storytelling Than Most Video Game Adaptations, Alison Willmore.
Netflix’ Russian Doll is in the vanguard of longform and episodic video storytelling that uses the logic of videogames, for an audience that has grown up with them.
Nadia is functionally stuck at a save point, unable to get past this particular stage in her life. And one of the reasons Russian Doll works so well is because it doesn’t treat this idea as a gimmick, or as something that requires an asterisk and further explanation, but as a concept that’s as ingrained in contemporary pop culture as any basic film or television reference.
New Feelings: Screen Protectiveness, Suzannah Showler.
On the unease at the prospect of letting other people see your phone because of what it might reveal about your private behaviour.
The kinds of digital particulates and residues that turn up in our devices aren’t the things we might normally stake our identities on, but the fact of their being recorded imbues them with new meaning. It’s like finding out you’ve been talking in your sleep — awful and embarrassing, but also fascinating. Of course you want to know what you’ve been saying.
Everything Else
Status as a Service (StaaS), Eugene Wei.
Fascinating theory of social networks as seen by how much social capital they generate for their users. I didn’t explain that well; just go and read it. (NB: it’s long.)
How we analyze social networks should include a study of a social network’s accumulation of social capital assets and the nature and structure of its status games. In other words, how do such companies capitalize, either consciously or not, on the fact that people are status-seeking monkeys, always trying to seek more of it in the most efficient way possible?
Amazon Alexa and the Search for the One Perfect Answer, James Vlamos.
The rise of conversational interfaces, such as smart speakers, means that our search queries will no longer return a page of links to possible results — instead, they will give us one correct answer. But is there always such a thing? And what does that mean for the web? I pre-ordered the author’s book on the basis of this article.
The strategy of delivering one-shot answers also implies that we live in a world in which facts are simple and absolute. Sure, many questions do have a single correct answer: Is Earth a sphere? What is the population of India? For other questions, though, there are multiple legitimate perspectives, which puts voice oracles in an awkward position.
An Interview with Nick Harkaway: Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality, Eliot Pepper.
I read Harkaway’s book, Gnomon, late last year. It’s bursting with smart ideas, to the extent that I’m going to need to read it again to really understand it.
Surveillance is itself something that can reshape your behavior, make you more cautious or more rash. It’s a downward pressure on to which the mind responds in ways that are not straightforward. The ultimate end point of being under that control — and surveillance is first and always about control of the environment and of people as an environment — can be startling.
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.
