Evening in Portland, Oregon on Friday 18 October, 2019 and both children are asleep. Today has been a family day - going out for hot chocolate, playing What The Golf, Mario Kart and board games with the three year old.
A few extra things for today’s episode:
“Decentralized”
Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown University yesterday and, well, it will not surprise you to learn that I have issues. Facebook have come under fire recently for deciding that they’re OK with politicians lying in advertisements; someone in Elizabeth Warren’s team immediately took advantage of the opportunity to point out the problems in this policy by taking out ads which… were lies.
Anyway: someone at Facebook has sat down and written a nice speech for Mr. Zuckerberg to read and other people than me have excellent criticisms of it. (For example: Mark Zuckerberg keeps lying about Facebook’s origin story and Scott Rosenberg on Zuckerberg being quite confused and misled about the existence of some sort of Fifth Estate). The speech is about how, in general, free speech is a good thing. This seems a rather anodyne point to make, but it’s this para that really stuck with me:
Zuckerberg: People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands. It’s part of this amazing expansion of voice through law, culture and technology.
People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world. People were able to do this — and were doing it, although perhaps not on the scale enabled by Twitter and then Facebook — certainly in the early days of the internet when people wrote blogs [sic] on their web logs all the time [sorry].
It is true that people no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard [my emphasis].
Zuckerberg says that he understands “the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power” and I can only quizzically ask: but that doesn’t appear to matter, does it? I mean, a serial-killer psychopath can “understand the concerns women may have about an indiscriminate killer”, but we wouldn’t expect that serial-killer psychopath to then do anything about it. I understand that some of the most successful (ie: uncaptured for a long period of time) serial killers were really smart and could’ve easily decided not to act on understanding!
What we have instead is Zuckerberg admitting, in a sort of Mick Mulvaney “get over it” sense, that concerns about centralization of power are moot and irrelevant, because “the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands.”
I mean, yeeeeees?
Look, does he think we’re dumb? You can have both, right? It can be true that platforms have decentralized a kind of power by putting some power directly into people’s hands and simultaneously these platforms can create and exercise a new power that is completely and utterly unaccountable. Zuckerberg has sole control of Facebook, its corporate and share structure effectively crowns him as a sort of l’internet, c’est moi. The board can’t do anything about him, shareholders can’t do anything about him. He is the (a?) Louis XIV of datacenters, media and communication, never mind everything else that Facebook touches.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say how wonderful it is that Facebook has let nation speak unto nation or, as it were, proudboys speak unto #blacklivesmatter (as he is eager to remind us, #blacklives matter “was first used on Facebook”).
Zuckerberg says that “With Facebook, more than 2 billion people now have a greater opportunity to express themselves and help others.” which, you know, is true in a literal, absolute, quantitative sense I suppose, but it is also true that these 2 billion people and their ability to express themselves is subject to the capricious, opaque, arbitrary, obfuscated and downright inconsistent moderation policy implemented by contract workers and from my comfortable external vantage point, put together by a bunch of people who would get failed out of their first year of law school. I should know, because I nearly did.
I just… really dislike this blatant spin. And it is blatant. I get it. Zuckerberg can talk about “the Air Force moms who started a Facebook group so their children and other service members who can’t get home for the holidays have a place to go,” and that’s fine, because those groups are real and they exist and the statement is a true statement. I co-creative directed a whole bunch of ads for Facebook about these groups! I would have been incredibly uncomfortable if they had not been true! Here’s one about cosplayers!
Nobody is saying that we want to “live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true”. Nobody also wants to live in a world where people can’t post photos of breastfeeding, but hey, whattayagottado?
Later on in his speech, Zuckerberg asks if this is “the internet we want”. He has set himself up in a position where, quite simply, he gets to decide.
Ambient internet
Some mail from Nick Sweeney in response to last episode’s mention of the Dunbar Number Again and what it takes for online local groups to uh, turn up in meatspace, I suppose. I realized that it’s easy to get hung up on the big players like Facebook and, in another sense, Nextdoor, but at the same time you’ve got services like Meetup which always felt a bit weird and extroverted to me (I mean, you can’t blame them, really), but Meetup has now been swallowed up and is due to be spat out by the Softbank, AKA Can’t Really Tell If They’re Just Bad At Investing Or Actually Trying To Dismantle The VC Ecosystem. There’s also a thing in just background internet. What can the internet do (that only the internet can do) that is ambient? Most of the easy uses that come to mind are things like listening to music or listening to podcasts or just… a screen with things on. But there’s always been this idea of some sort of ambient sixth sense, some sort of proprioception-for-people-at-a-distance, the whole “oh, I noticed this person has been doing this thing, I wonder if they’re doing OK”. Not overt signals. But little cues in a stream of events, none of which are competing in the attention economy.
Used to be, telling people what you were having for breakfast and posting a picture of it on twittr didn’t actually mean anything and at least for me, it didn’t feel like you were doing it for #social #points or #personalbrand and you might not need to tell people that you were so grateful and #blessed for this #avocadotoast. But then it feels like a sort of American rugged individualism sales attitude just creeps into everything and then suddenly it’s not like you’re just sharing something you like, you’ve got to have an angle. And then if you are sharing something that you like, suddenly you might start feeling self-conscious about it because other people might think you are shilling something? Sigh.
A thing about Design Fiction
I got a nice newsletter in my inbox from the people at the Near Future Laboratory and it was fantastic in an Intellectually Stimulating way, and also because it wasn’t written like the way this is written, and had some semblance of structure to it.
The bit that I appreciated was their notes about what Design Fiction should be for it to be useful and not just writing a story about something or making a video about something. Their argument is compelling! The kind of Design Fiction NFL talk about is rooted in presenting tangible artifacts because (I think I’m paraphrasing here), the act of making something tangible (the thing as opposed to talking about the thing or a video about the thing) is that it forces you to deal with it in a way because the thing is real, that isn’t impossible if you’re writing a story, but just… different and perhaps easier to do. If you’re making, in their example, a Quick Start Guide for a Self Driving Car, I totally buy the argument that you’re encouraged (and forced) to think about differently, in different contexts and in specific ways. Making a real thing means something that people pick up and engage with in a way that is very different than a story. Stories, I’d say, are also fine! They do different things. But I understand better now the distinction of design fiction artifacts.
So! I’m experimenting with a thing. You, the people receiving this, are the kind of people who decided that you wanted to give me some coins in not-quite-exchange for me doing more typing. I had a nice exchange with @mathpunk on Twitter that helped me think about this kind of writing-and-money-involved as more like busking and not some sort of brave new world of attention economy everyone for themselves side-gig thing. It is, instead, and as I have always insisted, something that I am doing for me.
And! I thought it would be nice to send out some free subscriptions. If there’s someone you know who would appreciate a free subscription, then reply and let me know their email address. I’m going to pick five and then I’ll let you know if they got picked and we can figure out a way to gift them a subscription without it all being weird. OK?
Right. It’s Friday again so that means it’s technically the weekend and in theory I have time to do all the things that I was not able to do during the week and I get to figure out new ways to say “no, you cannot play Mario Kart for the next eight hours” to my children.
I hope you’re all well, nominate a person if you’d like, and send me notes, too because I do always like them and I do reply to them.
Best,
Dan
","body_text":"0.0 Sitrep\nEvening in Portland, Oregon on Friday 18 October, 2019 and both children are asleep. Today has been a family day - going out for hot chocolate, playing What The Golf, Mario Kart and board games with the three year old.\n1.0 The Extra Things\nA few extra things for today’s episode:\n“Decentralized”\nMark Zuckerberg\ngave a speech at Georgetown University yesterday\nand, well, it will not surprise you to learn that I have issues. Facebook have come under fire recently for deciding that they’re OK with politicians lying in advertisements; someone in Elizabeth Warren’s team immediately took advantage of the opportunity to point out the problems in this policy by taking out ads which… were lies.\nAnyway: someone at Facebook has sat down and written a nice speech for Mr. Zuckerberg to read and other people than me have excellent criticisms of it. (For example:\nMark Zuckerberg keeps lying about Facebook’s origin story\nand Scott Rosenberg on Zuckerberg being\nquite confused and misled about the existence of some sort of Fifth Estate\n). The speech is about how, in general, free speech is a good thing. This seems a rather anodyne point to make, but it’s this para that really stuck with me:\nZuckerberg: People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands. It’s part of this amazing expansion of voice through law, culture and technology.\nPeople having the power to express themselves at scale\nis\na new kind of force in the world. People were able to do this — and were doing it, although perhaps not on the scale enabled by Twitter and then Facebook — certainly in the early days of the internet when people wrote blogs [sic] on their web logs all the time [sorry].\nIt\nis\ntrue that people no longer have to rely on\ntraditional gatekeepers\nin politics or media to make their voices heard [my emphasis].\nZuckerberg says that he understands “the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power” and I can only quizzically ask:\nbut that doesn’t appear to matter, does it?\nI mean, a serial-killer psychopath can “understand the concerns women may have about an indiscriminate killer”, but we wouldn’t expect that serial-killer psychopath to then do anything about it. I understand that some of the most successful (ie: uncaptured for a long period of time) serial killers were really smart and could’ve easily decided not to act on understanding!\nWhat we have instead is Zuckerberg admitting, in a sort of Mick Mulvaney “\nget over it\n” sense, that concerns about centralization of power are moot and irrelevant, because “the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands.”\nI mean, yeeeeees?\nLook, does he think we’re dumb? You can have both, right? It can be true that platforms have decentralized\na kind of power\nby putting\nsome power\ndirectly into people’s hands and simultaneously these platforms can\ncreate and exercise a new power\nthat is completely and utterly unaccountable. Zuckerberg has sole control of Facebook, its corporate and share structure effectively crowns him as a sort of\nl’internet, c’est moi\n. The board can’t do anything about him, shareholders can’t do anything about him. He is the (a?) Louis XIV of datacenters, media and communication,\nnever mind everything else that Facebook touches\n.\nYou can’t have it both ways. You can’t say how wonderful it is that Facebook has let nation speak unto nation or, as it were, proudboys speak unto #blacklivesmatter (as he is eager to remind us, #blacklives matter “was first used on Facebook”).\nZuckerberg says that “With Facebook, more than 2 billion people now have a greater opportunity to express themselves and help others.” which, you know, is true in a literal, absolute, quantitative sense I suppose, but it is\nalso true\nthat these 2 billion people and their ability to express themselves is subject to the capricious, opaque, arbitrary, obfuscated and downright inconsistent moderation policy implemented by contract workers and from my comfortable external vantage point, put together by a bunch of people who would get failed out of their first year of law school. I should know, because I nearly did.\nI just… really dislike this blatant spin. And it\nis\nblatant. I get it. Zuckerberg can talk about “the Air Force moms who started a Facebook group so their children and other service members who can’t get home for the holidays have a place to go,” and that’s fine, because those groups are real and they exist and the statement is a true statement. I co-\ncreative directed a whole bunch of ads for Facebook about these groups\n! I would have been incredibly uncomfortable if they had not been true! Here’s one about\ncosplayers\n!\nNobody is saying that we want to “live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true”. Nobody also wants to live in a world where people can’t post photos of breastfeeding, but hey, whattayagottado?\nLater on in his speech, Zuckerberg asks if this is “the internet we want”. He has set himself up in a position where, quite simply, he gets to decide.\nAmbient internet\nSome mail from Nick Sweeney in response to last episode’s mention of the Dunbar Number Again and what it takes for online local groups to uh, turn up in meatspace, I suppose. I realized that it’s easy to get hung up on the big players like Facebook and, in another sense, Nextdoor, but at the same time you’ve got services like Meetup which always felt a bit weird and extroverted to me (I mean, you can’t blame them, really), but Meetup has now been swallowed up and is due to be spat out by the Softbank, AKA Can’t Really Tell If They’re Just Bad At Investing Or Actually Trying To Dismantle The VC Ecosystem. There’s also a thing in just\nbackground internet\n. What can the internet do (that only the internet can do) that is ambient? Most of the easy uses that come to mind are things like listening to music or listening to podcasts or just… a screen with things on. But there’s always been this idea of some sort of ambient sixth sense, some sort of proprioception-for-people-at-a-distance, the whole “oh, I noticed this person has been doing this thing, I wonder if they’re doing OK”. Not overt signals. But little cues in a stream of events, none of which are competing in the attention economy.\nUsed to be, telling people what you were having for breakfast and posting a picture of it on twittr didn’t actually\nmean\nanything and at least for me, it didn’t feel like you were doing it for #social #points or #personalbrand and you might not need to tell people that you were so grateful and #blessed for this #avocadotoast. But then it feels like a sort of American rugged individualism sales attitude just creeps into everything and then suddenly it’s not like you’re just sharing something you like, you’ve got to have an angle. And then if you\nare\nsharing something that you like, suddenly you might start feeling self-conscious about it because other people might think you\nare\nshilling something? Sigh.\nA thing about Design Fiction\nI got a\nnice newsletter\nin my inbox from the people at the Near Future Laboratory and it was fantastic in an Intellectually Stimulating way, and also because it wasn’t written like the way this is written, and had some semblance of structure to it.\nThe bit that I appreciated was their notes about what Design Fiction should be for it to be useful and not just\nwriting a story about something\nor\nmaking a video about something\n. Their argument is compelling! The kind of Design Fiction NFL talk about is rooted in presenting tangible artifacts because (I think I’m paraphrasing here), the act of making something tangible (the\nthing\nas opposed to\ntalking about the thing\nor\na video about the thing\n) is that it forces you to deal with it in a way because the thing is real, that isn’t impossible if you’re writing a story, but just… different and perhaps easier to do. If you’re making, in their example, a\nQuick Start Guide for a Self Driving Car\n, I totally buy the argument that you’re encouraged (and forced) to think about differently, in different contexts and in specific ways. Making a real thing means something that people pick up and engage with in a way that is very different than a story. Stories, I’d say, are also fine! They do different things. But I understand better now the distinction of design fiction artifacts.\nSo! I’m experimenting with a thing. You, the people receiving this, are the kind of people who decided that you wanted to give me some coins in not-quite-exchange for me doing more typing. I had a nice exchange with @mathpunk on Twitter that helped me think about this kind of writing-and-money-involved as more like busking and not some sort of brave new world of attention economy everyone for themselves side-gig thing. It is, instead, and as I have always insisted, something that I am doing for me.\nAnd! I thought it would be nice to send out some free subscriptions. If there’s someone you know who would appreciate a free subscription, then reply and let me know their email address. I’m going to pick five and then I’ll let you know if they got picked and we can figure out a way to gift them a subscription without it all being weird. OK?\nRight. It’s Friday again so that means it’s technically the weekend and in theory I have time to do all the things that I was not able to do during the week\nand\nI get to figure out new ways to say “no, you cannot play Mario Kart for the next eight hours” to my children.\nI hope you’re all well, nominate a person if you’d like, and send me notes, too because I do always like them and I do reply to them.\nBest,\nDan","raw_format":"html","source":"import","summary":"This issue centers on Mark Zuckerberg's Georgetown speech defending Facebook as a force for decentralization, with the author dismantling the contradiction at the heart of that argument: while Facebook may have given individuals platforms for expression, it has simultaneously concentrated unprecedented power in Zuckerberg's hands, creating arbitrary moderation policies that govern billions of users without accountability. The author argues that these two realities aren't mutually exclusive—you can celebrate genuine community groups formed on the platform while simultaneously recognizing that the platform's centralized control over speech, combined with inconsistent and opaque content moderation, undermines the claim that it has truly democratized power. A brief note also touches on alternative platforms and online community tools beyond the major tech players.","reading_minutes":9,"links":[{"url":"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/#click=https://t.co/DAnHQlHamf","normalized_url":"https://washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression","domain":"washingtonpost.com","anchor_text":"gave a speech at Georgetown University yesterday","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook/","normalized_url":"https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook","domain":"mashable.com","anchor_text":"Mark Zuckerberg keeps lying about Facebook’s origin story","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://mobile.twitter.com/scottros/status/1185335068224446464","normalized_url":"https://mobile.twitter.com/scottros/status/1185335068224446464","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"quite confused and misled about the existence of some sort of Fifth Estate","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/get-over-it-mulvaneys-twin-admissions-put-trump-at-the-center-of-emoluments-and-ukraine-controversies/2019/10/17/28ca595c-f10c-11e9-b648-76bcf86eb67e_story.html","normalized_url":"https://washingtonpost.com/politics/get-over-it-mulvaneys-twin-admissions-put-trump-at-the-center-of-emoluments-and-ukraine-controversies/2019/10/17/28ca595c-f10c-11e9-b648-76bcf86eb67e_story.html","domain":"washingtonpost.com","anchor_text":"get over it","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://adage.com/creativity/work/big-sister/34408","normalized_url":"https://adage.com/creativity/work/big-sister/34408","domain":"adage.com","anchor_text":"creative directed a whole bunch of ads for Facebook about these groups","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://vimeo.com/88525023","normalized_url":"https://vimeo.com/88525023","domain":"vimeo.com","anchor_text":"cosplayers","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://mailchi.mp/nearfuturelaboratory/seldom-dispatch-6-from-the-near-future-laboratory-2969593?e=2d7613e15d","normalized_url":"https://mailchi.mp/nearfuturelaboratory/seldom-dispatch-6-from-the-near-future-laboratory-2969593?e=2d7613e15d","domain":"mailchi.mp","anchor_text":"nice newsletter","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"http://qsg.nearfuturelaboratory.com/","normalized_url":"http://qsg.nearfuturelaboratory.com/","domain":"nearfuturelaboratory.com","anchor_text":"Quick Start Guide for a Self Driving Car","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"}],"sections":[{"id":1603,"ord":0,"number":"0.0","heading":"Sitrep","level":1,"word_count":41},{"id":1604,"ord":1,"number":"1.0","heading":"The Extra Things","level":1,"word_count":1726}]}