Virtual Life, Digital Pollution, and Mirrorworld
Thoughtful Net #67: curated links from the past week
Last year I bought a Pixel 3 and its wireless-charging dock, the Pixel Stand. When the phone is docked the stand can make it act like a digital photo frame, displaying at a set interval photos that it’s selected from your Google Photos account using some kind of ‘interestingness’ algorithm — it chooses only the photos which meet some unknown criteria, showing you places and friends and avoiding things like receipts and screenshots. Where photos are too big for the frame (say, in landscape) it crops to show only the most interesting part of your interesting photo. It’s very clever.
It lead me to think about the difference between photos that are private on your phone vs photos that are shown in shared spaces (like on your TV, for example, as the same feature is available on Chromecast). I’m sure most people wouldn’t be entirely comfortable to let someone else go through their phone’s photo gallery; everybody has photos they’d like to keep private — or, perhaps, secrets they’d like to keep. What if you’d been somewhere you hadn’t told your partner about? Or if you’d taken an embarrasing picture of yourself on a night out? And I wondered about how many algorithms work on the presumption that people don’t keep secrets from each other.
Anyway, here’s The Thoughtful Net #67, just one scant week after #66, and with a whopping THREE best articles.
The Best
My Disabled Son’s Amazing Gaming Life in the World of Warcraft, Vicky Schaubert.
The parents of a Norwegian child thought their son, born with muscular dystrophy, lived a lonely and isolated existence — until he died. This genuinely brought me to tears; a beautiful story of how digital technology enables, empowers, and equals.
Online play is a fantastic arena for meeting people and building friendships. We discover each other without stereotypes in the way. I think Mats was lucky to belong to our time, technologically. If he had been born 15 years earlier, he wouldn’t have found a community like that.
The World Is Choking on Digital Pollution, Judy Estrin and Sam Gill.
Comparing the toxic by-products of progress today with those of the industrial revolution, and the effort required to fix them then with the effort required now. A really smart piece.
Digital pollution is more complicated than industrial pollution. Industrial pollution is the by-product of a value-producing process, not the product itself. On the internet, value and harm are often one and the same. It is the way the internet allows more expression that amplifies hate speech, harassment, and misinformation than at any point in human history.
AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform — Call It Mirrorworld, Kevin Kelly.
The race to build a digital overlay to the physical world, and the opportunities and risks that will entail when we spend time between the two realities. This is so, so good.
The mirrorworld doesn’t yet fully exist, but it is coming. Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld. For now, only tiny patches of the mirrorworld are visible through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual fragments are being stitched together to form a shared, persistent place that will parallel the real world. We are now building… a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform.
Computer Vision
Porn: You Know It When You See It, but Can a Computer?, Bijan Stephan.
The difficulty of training systems to detect porn when we can barely decide for ourselves what it is.
After you’ve got a training data set from your favorite porn site, the next step is to rip out all the frames from the videos that aren’t explicitly porn to make sure that the frames you’re using are not, like, a guy holding a pizza box.
Cameras That Understand: Portrait Mode and Google Lens, Ben Evans. Typically smart deep-dive/think-out-loud piece by Ben Evans where he considers the implications of, and the path forward for, computational photography and computer vision.
One of the desire paths of the smartphone camera is that since we have it with us all the time and we can take unlimited pictures for free, and have them instantly, we don’t just take more pictures of our children and dogs but also pictures of things that we’d never have taken pictures of before. We take pictures of posters and books and things we might want to buy — we take pictures of recipes, catalogues, conference schedules, train timetables (Americans, ask a foreigner) and fliers. The smartphone image sensor has become a notebook.
Technology in the World
The Limits of Extremely Online Organizing, Alexis C. Madrigal.
How online activism is applied to everything, and how it can produce results even though it doesn’t change anything.
To participate in public debate, tell jokes, or make art, one must also produce consumable posts that create the distribution pipe for your actual work. Some people use that power to sell flat-tummy tea or sneakers or hotel stays in the Maldives, but most people are just trying to sell themselves. To live among the extremely online is to buy into this hierarchy of meaning.
The Coming Commodification of Life at Home, Joe Pinsker.
The smart home offers convenience, but threatens to shape our behaviour through monitoring. What could be the ramifications of the home becoming a tech platform?
Even if many Americans are currently wary of what big tech companies are doing with their data… they nonetheless adore something that lets them turn on the lights without using their hands or adjust the temperature of their living room from the other side of the world. And if they’re thrilled with the product, they’ll be more comfortable being monitored by it.
Everything Else
Emoji Don’t Mean What They Used To, Ian Bogost.
The expansion of official emoji characters is shifting them from ideograms to illustrations; as they become more specific, they become less useful.
It makes sense that emoji should strive to cover the gamut of human experience. But more specificity means less flexibility. That is, an emoji that shares other possible meanings… is assumed to be a less desirable design choice than one with a singular, fixed meaning. That idea might or might not have political merit, but it does represent a shift in the way emoji have been conceived, approved, and used.
There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology, Bruce Schneier.
I know it seems like every article I post about blockchain is negative, but honestly I haven’t read anything yet that really convinces me otherwise.
What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure. When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse.
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.
