Thought Shrapnel

Although I listen to a lot of podcasts (here’s my OPML file) I don’t listen to many audiobooks. That’s partly because I never feel up-to-date with my podcast listening, but also because I often read before going to sleep. It’s much more difficult to find your place again if you drift off while listening than while reading!

This article in TIME magazine (is it still a ‘magazine’?) looks at the research into whether listening to an audiobook is like reading using your eyes. Well, first off, it would seem that there’s no difference in recall of facts given a non-fiction text:

For a 2016 study, Rogowsky put her assumptions to the test. One group in her study listened to sections of Unbroken, a nonfiction book about World War II by Laura Hillenbrand, while a second group read the same parts on an e-reader. She included a third group that both read and listened at the same time. Afterward, everyone took a quiz designed to measure how well they had absorbed the material. “We found no significant differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and listening simultaneously,” Rogowsky says.

However, the difficulty here is that there's already an observed discrepancy in recall between dead-tree books and e-books. So perhaps audiobooks are as good as e-books, but both aren't as good as printed matter?

There’s a really interesting point made in the article about how dead-tree books allow for a slight ‘rest’ while you’re reading:

If you’re reading, it’s pretty easy to go back and find the point at which you zoned out. It’s not so easy if you’re listening to a recording, Daniel says. Especially if you’re grappling with a complicated text, the ability to quickly backtrack and re-examine the material may aid learning, and this is likely easier to do while reading than while listening. “Turning the page of a book also gives you a slight break,” he says. This brief pause may create space for your brain to store or savor the information you’re absorbing.

This reminds me of an article on Lifehacker a few years ago that quoted a YouTuber who swears by reading a book while also listening to it:

First of all, it combines two senses…so you end up with really good comprehension while being really efficient at the same time. ...Another possibly even more important benefit is…it keeps you going. So you’re not going back and rereading things, you’re not taking all kinds of unnecessary breaks and pauses, your eyes aren’t running around all the time, and you’re not getting distracted every two minutes.

Since switching to an open source e-reader, I'm no longer using the Amazon Kindle ecosystem so much these days. If I were, I'd be experimenting with their WhisperSync technology that allows you to either pick up where you left up with one medium — or, indeed, use both at the same time.

Source: TIME / Lifehacker

The EU is certainly coming out swinging against Big Tech this year. Or at least it thinks it is. Yesterday, the European Parliament voted in favour of three proposals, outlined by the EFF’s indefatigable Cory Doctorow as:

1. Article 13: the Copyright Filters. All but the smallest platforms will have to defensively adopt copyright filters that examine everything you post and censor anything judged to be a copyright infringement.

2. Article 11: Linking to the news using more than one word from the article is prohibited unless you’re using a service that bought a license from the news site you want to link to. News sites can charge anything they want for the right to quote them or refuse to sell altogether, effectively giving them the right to choose who can criticise them. Member states are permitted, but not required, to create exceptions and limitations to reduce the harm done by this new right.

3. Article 12a: No posting your own photos or videos of sports matches. Only the “organisers” of sports matches will have the right to publicly post any kind of record of the match. No posting your selfies, or short videos of exciting plays. You are the audience, your job is to sit where you’re told, passively watch the game and go home.

Music Week pointed out that Article 13 is particularly problematic for artists:

While the Copyright Directive covers a raft of digital issues, a sticking point within the music industry had been the adoption of Article 13 which seeks to put the responsibility on online platforms to police copyright in advance of posting user generated content on their services, either by restricting posts or by obtaining full licenses for copyrighted material.

The proof of the pudding, as The Verge points out, will be in the interpretation and implementation by EU member states:

However, those backing these provisions say the arguments above are the result of scaremongering by big US tech companies, eager to keep control of the web’s biggest platforms. They point to existing laws and amendments to the directive as proof it won’t be abused in this way. These include exemptions for sites like GitHub and Wikipedia from Article 13, and exceptions to the “link tax” that allow for the sharing of mere hyperlinks and “individual words” describing articles without constraint.

I can't help but think this is a ham-fisted way of dealing with a non-problem. As Doctorow also states, part of the issue here is the assumption that competition in a free market is at the core of creativity. I'd argue that's untrue, that culture is built by respectfully appropriating and building on the work of others. These proposals, as they currently stand (and as I currently understand them) actively undermine internet culture.

Source: Music Week / EFF / The Verge

This map of what happens when you interact with a digital assistant such as the Amazon Echo is incredible. The image is taken from a length piece of work which is trying to bring attention towards the hidden costs of using such devices.

With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user’s commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song – requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives.

It's a tour de force. Here's another extract:

When a human engages with an Echo, or another voice-enabled AI device, they are acting as much more than just an end-product consumer. It is difficult to place the human user of an AI system into a single category: rather, they deserve to be considered as a hybrid case. Just as the Greek chimera was a mythological animal that was part lion, goat, snake and monster, the Echo user is simultaneously a consumer, a resource, a worker, and a product. This multiple identity recurs for human users in many technological systems. In the specific case of the Amazon Echo, the user has purchased a consumer device for which they receive a set of convenient affordances. But they are also a resource, as their voice commands are collected, analyzed and retained for the purposes of building an ever-larger corpus of human voices and instructions. And they provide labor, as they continually perform the valuable service of contributing feedback mechanisms regarding the accuracy, usefulness, and overall quality of Alexa’s replies. They are, in essence, helping to train the neural networks within Amazon’s infrastructural stack.

Well worth a read, especially alongside another article in Bloomberg about what they call 'oral literacy' but which I referred to in my thesis as 'oracy':

Should the connection between the spoken word and literacy really be so alien to us? After all, starting in the 1950s, basic literacy training in elementary schools in the United States has involved ‘phonics.’ And what is phonics but a way of attaching written words to the sounds they had been or could become? The theory grew out of the belief that all those lines of text on the pages of schoolbooks had become too divorced from their sounds; phonics was intended to give new readers a chance to recognize written language as part of the world of language they already knew.

The technological landscape is reforming what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Interestingly, some of that is a kind of a return to previous forms of human interaction that we used to value a lot more.

Sources: Anatomy of AI and Bloomberg

“Those who work much, do not work hard.”

(Henry David Thoreau)

Look at the following list and answer honestly the extent to which your current role, either as an employee or freelancer, matches up:

1. Work that is engaging
2. Work that benefits other people
3. Work that you're good at (and feel valued for)
4. Flexibility in how and where you work
5. A lack of major negatives (e.g. long commute, unpredictable working hours)
6. The chance for meaningful collaboration

I would wager that very few people could claim to be enjoying all six. I'm pretty close in my current position, I reckon, but of course it's easy to quickly forget how privileged I am.

It’s easier to see how remote positions fulfil points #4 and #5 than being employed in a particular place to work certain hours. On the other hand, the second part of #3 and #6 can be difficult remotely.

My advice? Focus on on #1 and #2 as they’re perhaps the most difficult to engineer. As an employee, look for interesting jobs with companies that have a pro-social mission. And if you’re a freelancer, once you’re financially secure, seek out gigs with similar.

Source: Fast Company

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Image by WOCinTech Chat used under a CC BY license

“It appear[s] like a calm existence [but] the turmoil is invisible.”

(Maira Kalman)

Some people are easy to follow online. They have one social media account to which they post regularly, and back that up with a single website where they expand on those points.

Stowe Boyd, whose work I’ve followed (or attempted to follow) for a few years now, is not one of these people. In fact, the number of platforms he tried earlier this year prompted me to get in touch with him to ask just how many platforms now had his subscribers' email addresses.

Ironically, it was only last week that I decided to support Stowe’s latest venture via Substack. However, in a post yesterday he explains that he’s going ‘back to square one’:

I won’t recapitulate the many transitions that have gone on in my search for the 'right’ newsletter/subscription technologies over the past year. But I have come to the conclusion that I am more interested in growing the community of Work Futures readers than I am in trying to make cash flow from it.

The thing I've learned about posting things to the internet over the last twenty years is that nobody cares. People support things that reflect who they believe themselves to be right now. That changes over time.

So if you’re putting things online, you have to make sure it works for you. Even the most fun jobs imaginable can become… something else if you focus too much on what a fickle audience wants.

As I said, I am motivated to take these steps in part by the desire to simplify my daily activities, and shelve work patterns that suck time. But I am equally motivated by making the discourse around these topics more open, while encouraging people to support Work Futures, but in that order of importance.

Openness always wins. You can support Stowe's work via donations, and my work via Patreon.

Source: Work Futures

The latest issue of the newsletter hit inboxes earlier today!

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This chart, via Psychology Today, is pretty unequivocal. It shows the activities correlated with happiness (green) and unhappiness (red) in American teenagers:

I discussed this with our eleven year-old son, who pretty much just nodded his head. I’m not sure he knew what to say, given that most of the things he enjoys doing in his free time are red on that chart!

Take a look at the bottom of the chart: Listening to music shows the strongest correlation with unhappiness. That may seem strange at first, but consider how most teens listen to music these days: On their phones, with earbuds firmly in place. Although listening to music is not screen time per se, it is a phone activity for the vast majority of teens. Teens who spend hours listening to music are often shutting out the world, effectively isolating themselves in a cocoon of sound.

This stuff isn't rocket science, I guess:

There’s another way to look at this chart – with the exception of sleep, activities that usually involve being with other people are the most strongly correlated with happiness, and those that involve being alone are the most strongly correlated with unhappiness. That might be why listening to music, which most teens do alone, is linked to unhappiness, while going to music concerts, which is done with other people, is linked to happiness. It’s not the music that’s linked to unhappiness; it’s the way it’s enjoyed. There are a few gray areas here. Talking on a cell phone and using video chat are linked to less happiness – perhaps because talking on the phone, although social connection, is not as satisfying as actually being with others, or because they are a phone activities even though they are not, strictly speaking, screen time. Working, usually done with others, is a wash, perhaps because most of the jobs teens have are not particularly fulfilling.

I might pin this up in the house somewhere for future reference...

Source: Psychology Today

I’ve used quite a bit of Ben Werdmuller’s software over the years. He co-founded Elgg, which I used for some of my postgraduate work, and Known, which a few of us experimented with for blogging a few years ago.

Ben’s always been an entrepreneur and is currently working on blockchain technologies after working for an early stage VC company. He’s a thoughtful human being and writes about technology and the humans who create it, and in this post bemoans the macho work culture endemic in tech:

It’s not normal. Eight years into working in America, I’m still getting used to the macho culture around vacations. I had previously lived in a country where 28 days per year is the minimum that employers can legally provide; taking time off is just considered a part of life. The US is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee any vacation at all (the others are Tonga, Palau, Nauru, Micronesia, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands). It’s telling that American workers often respond to this simple fact with disbelief. How does anything get done?! Well, it turns out that a lot gets done when people aren’t burned out or chained to their desks.

Ben comes up with some 'rules':

1. Take a real lunch hour
2. Take short breaks and get a change of scenery
3. Go home
4. Rotate being on call — and automate as much as possible
5. Always know when your next vacation is
6. Employers: provide Time Off In Lieu (or pay for overtime)
7. Trust
8. Track and impose norms with structure
9. Take responsibility for each other’s well being

All solid ideas, but only nine rules? I feel like there's a tenth one missing:

10. Connect with a wider purpose

After all, if you don’t know the point of what you’re working for, then you’ll be lacking motivation no matter how many (or few) hours you work.

Source: Ben Werdmuller

In last week’s newsletter, the first after a month’s hiatus over the summer, I asked the 1,500+ subscribers to Thought Shrapnel’s if they’d send me answers to the following:

1. What do you really like about Thought Shrapnel in its current format?
2. What do you dislike about it?

So far, six days later, I've received 15 responses, which represents 1% of the subscriber base.

Here’s an anonymised sample of what they said:

• "I like the diversity of links and ideas that you provide. Not sure if that helps."
• "I don't dislike it, but some of the more technical stuff -- blockchain -- is less interesting to me than the educational stuff."
• "You remind me of myself 40 years ago. Thank you."
• "In it’s current format, it’s hard to save to Pocket for offline reading on an airplane (or someplace else without an Internet connection."
• "I most appreciate your insight and perspective in these informational sources. That is to suggest...that I for one value when you provide context about the stories you're sharing. Furthermore, you dig in a bit deeper and educate about the nuance involved...but also the larger impact of this news."
• "I’m happy to support the continuing collation of, and reflection on developments. Your thinking touches on multiple fields, and this is something I find particularly valuable."
• "For me it's a better way of keeping up to date with what you're posting rather than getting notifications of each individual post through other channels."
• "I also like how you point to new robust technologies which I’m on the lookout for."
• "There's not much I don't like and, to be honest, I'm happy to skip the parts each week that aren't particularly relevant to me."
• "I don't know Google's parameters for clipping emails, but I do know that I can click the "view full email" option to see it all, but I usually don't."

It's always nice to see kind words written about your work, which I obviously appreciate. The main thing it would seem that I need to change is that the newsletter gets 'clipped' by GMail and other providers. In other words, I need to make it shorter.

 

“With your expertise and knowledge, but you’ll never be an artist

And I’m harder on myself than you could ever be regardless

What I’ll never be is flawless, all I’ll ever be is honest

Even when I’m gone they’re gonna say I brought it”

(Eminem)

I’ve been following Dan Meyer’s work on-and-off for over a decade now. He’s a Maths teacher by trade, but now working as Chief Academic Officer at Desmos after gaining his PhD from Stanford. He’s a smart guy, and a great blogger.

Dan’s particularly interested in how kids learn Maths (or ‘Math’ because he’s American) and is always particularly concerned to disprove/squash approaches that don’t work:

In the wake of Barbara Oakley’s op-ed in the New York Times arguing that we overemphasize conceptual understanding in math class, it’s become clear to me that our national conversation about math instruction is missing at least one crucial element: nobody knows what anybody means by “conceptual understanding.”

It's worth reading the whole post (and the comment section), but I just wanted to pull out a couple of things which I think are useful:

A student who has procedural fluency but lacks conceptual understanding …

• Can accurately subtract 2018-1999 using a standard algorithm, but doesn’t recognize that counting up would be more efficient.
• Can accurately compute the area of a triangle, but doesn’t recognize how its formula was derived or how it can be extended to other shapes. (eg. trapezoids, parallelograms, etc.)
• Can accurately calculate the discriminant of y = x² + 2 to determine that it doesn’t have any real roots, but couldn’t draw a quick sketch of the parabola to figure that out more efficiently.

I find this all the time with my own kids, and also when I was teaching. For example, I knew that the students in my Year 7 History class could draw a line graph in Maths, but they didn't seem to be able to do it in my classroom for some reason. In other words, they were 'procedurally fluent' in a particular domain.

Children are very good at giving the impression to adults that they understand and can do what they’re being told to do. Poke a little, and you come to realise that they don’t really understand what’s going on. That’s particularly true in History, where it’s easy to regurgitate facts and dates, without any empathy or historical understanding.

Another thing that Dan points out which I think we should all take to heart is that we should learn a bit of humility. He criticises both Barbara Oakley (op-ed in The New York Times) and Paul Morgan (author of an article with which he disagrees for not having what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call ‘skin in the game':

If you’re going to engage with the ideas of a complex field, engage with its best. That’s good practice for all of us and it’s especially good practice for people who are commenting from outside the field like Oakley (trained in engineering) and Morgan (trained in education policy).

Everyone's got opinions. The important thing is to listen to those who are talking sense.

Source: dy/dan

A colleague, who also works remotely, shared this article recently. Although I enjoy working remotely, it’s not without its downsides.

The author, Martin De Wulf, is a coder writing for an audience of software engineers. That’s not me, but I do work in the world of tech. The things that De Wulf says makes remote working stressful are:

1. Dehumanisation: "communication tends to stick to structured channels"
2. Interruptions and multitasking: "being responsive on the chat accomplishes the same as being on time at work in an office: it gives an image of reliability"
3. Overworking: "this all amounts for me to the question of trust: your employer trusted you a lot, allowing you to work on your own terms , and in exchange, I have always felt compelled to actually work a lot more than if I was in an office."
4. Being a stay at home dad: "When you spend a good part of your time at home, your family sees you as more available than they should."
5. Loneliness: "I do enjoy being alone quite a lot, but even for me, after two weeks of only seeing colleagues through my screen, and then my family at night, I end up feeling quite sad. I miss feeling integrated in a community of pairs."
6. Deciding where to work every day: "not knowing where I will be working everyday, and having to think about which hardware I need to take with me"
7. You never leave 'work': "working at home does not leave you time to cool off while coming back home from work"
8. Career risk: "working remotely makes you less visible in your company"

I've managed to deal with at least half of this list. Here's some suggestions.

• Video conference calls: they're not a replacement for face-to-face meetings, but they're a lot better than audio only or just relying on emails and text chats.
• Home office: I have one separate to the house. Also, it sounds ridiculous but I've got a sign I bought on eBay that slides between 'free' (green) and 'busy' (red).
• Travel: at every opportunity. Even though it takes me away from my wife and kids, I do see mine a lot more than the average office worker.
• Realistic expectations: four hours of solid 'knowledge work' per day plus emails and admin tasks is enough.

Source: Hacker Noon

You may not be able to detect it, but fluorescent lights flicker. They trigger my migraines. In fact, they affect me to such an extent that, when I worked at the university, I was on the ‘disabled’ list and had to have adjustments made. These included making sure I sat near a window to maximise the amount of natural light in my workspace.

In this HBR article, written by a partner at a HR advisory and research firm, the author cites a survey which shows that all employees want access to natural light

In a research poll of 1,614 North American employees, we found that access to natural light and views of the outdoors are the number one attribute of the workplace environment, outranking stalwarts like onsite cafeterias, fitness centers, and premium perks including on-site childcare.

One of the best things about working remotely ('from home') is that you can go and sit somewhere that has good natural light. There's a coffee shop near us that has two walls completely made of glass. It's wonderful.

The study also found that the absence of natural light and outdoor views hurts the employee experience. Over a third of employees feel that they don’t get enough natural light in their workspace. 47% of employees admit they feel tired or very tired from the absence of natural light or a window at their office, and 43% report feeling gloomy because of the lack of light.

The next point is an important one about hierarchies:

Too often, organizations design workspaces for executives with large windows while lower level employees do not have access to light. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Airbnb has pushed the limits of designing its customer call center operation in Portland, Oregon. Rather than windowless work stations commonly found in call centers, the Airbnb Call Center is designed to be an open space with access to natural light and views of the surroundings while replacing desks and phones with long couches, standing desks and wireless technology. The benefits of these elements is is well recognized. In fact, some European Union countries mandate employee proximity to windows as part of their national building code! This is because they realize that an absence of natural light hurts overall employee experience, up and down the organization.

I've been reading Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham, which explores issues like these. Fascinating stuff.

Source: Harvard Business Review

“People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.”

(Ellen Ullman)

Austin Kleon makes a simple, but important point, about how to become a writer:

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Kleon has previously recommended Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book, which I bought last time he mentioned it. Ironically enough, it's sitting on my bookshelf, unread. Anyway, he quotes Adler and Van Doren as saying:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.

I read a lot of non-fiction books on my e-reader*, so the equivalent of that for me is Thought Shrapnel, I guess...

Source: Austin Kleon

* Note: I left my old e-reader on the flight home from our holiday. I took the opportunity to upgrade to the bq Cervantes 4, which I bought from Amazon Spain.

After a wonderful August, travelling with my family and taking time off from Thought Shrapnel, I’m back.

This is the 420th post here. I collect potential posts as drafts, which means I’ve currently got a backlog of 157 potential posts. Obviously, the vast majority of those are never going to see the light of day, so I thought I’d just link to them below.

Here’s a list of 10 articles from each of the first six months of 2018. They’re links that I never got around to writing about, but I think might interest you. Note that I’ve listed them in terms of when I discovered them, which is not necessarily when they were originally published.

January

1. Fake News about the Future of Education
2. Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy
3. 10 New Principles Of Good Design
4. Want to Change the World With Your Business? Grow Slow
5. How children’s TV went from Blue Peter to YouTube’s wild west
6. Autopsy of a Failed Holacracy: Lessons in Justice, Equity, and Self-Management
7. The Great Attention Heist
8. Android Users: To Avoid Malware, Try the F-Droid App Store
9. Showing Off to the Universe: Beacons for the Afterlife of Our Civilization
10. Will tech giants move on from the internet, now we’ve all been harvested?

February

1. Your Pills Are Spying On You
2. The Olympics are a mass propaganda tool for countries to assimilate their citizens
3. Truly open education will require sweeping changes
4. The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences
5. Humanity's Biggest Machines Will Be Built in Space
6. The usefulness of dread
7. The Internet Isn't Forever
8. Algorithmic Wilderness
9. Are We Ready For a Post-Work World?
10. If the elite ever cared about the have-nots, that didn’t last long

March

1. Education in the (Dis)Information Age
2. How Tiny Red Dots Took Over Your Life
3. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
4. Twitter is not a public utility
5. The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News
6. Small, Regular Doses of Caffeine Offer the Biggest Mental Boost
7. Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous.
8. Beyond the Tree Octopus – Why we need a new view of k12 (digital) literacy in a Cambridge Analytica world
9. I work therefore I am: why businesses are hiring philosophers
10. Critical Thinking for Educators

April

1. Researchers develop device that can 'hear' your internal voice
2. 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
3. What Comes After The Social Media Empires
4. Coming up with a title
5. Eminent Philosophers Name the 43 Most Important Philosophy Books Written Between 1950-2000: Wittgenstein, Foucault, Rawls & More
6. An Open Education Reader
7. Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires
8. Say Goodbye To The Information Age: It’s All About Reputation Now
9. Why co-operative education needs a rethink
10. A Modest Guide to Productivity

May

1. Alfie’s Army, misinformation and propaganda: The need for critical media literacy in a mediated world
2. Hot Prospect: Designer Richard Holbrook’s Three-Year Quest to Understand the World’s Most Creative Companies
3. Chromebooks are ready for your next coding project
4. Tech firms can't keep our data forever: we need a Digital Expiry Date
5. How to achieve happiness and balance as a remote worker
6. Create Kid Skills for Alexa
7. Should Africa let Silicon Valley in?
8. Autocrypt: convenient end-to-end encryption for email
9. Scouts' new visual identity designed to diversify membership
10. A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS

June

1. Do platforms work?
2. Why read Aristotle today?
3. The Uncertain Future of OER
4. Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?
5. The Theology of Consensus
6. Building a Cooperative Economy
7. What’s right for your company? Decision making in 3 different organizational structures
8. The ethics of ceding more power to machines
9. UTC is Enough for Everyone... Right?
10. It’s impossible to lead a totally ethical life—but it’s fun to try

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“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”

(Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

We tend to use words to denote something right up to the time that term becomes untenable. Someone has to invent a better one. Take mobile phones, for example. They’re literally named after the least-used app on there, so we’re crying out for a different way to refer to them. Perhaps a better name would be ‘trackers’.

These days, most people use mobile devices for social networking. These are available free at the point of access, funded by what we’re currently calling ‘advertising’. However, as this author notes, it’s nothing of the sort:

What we have today is not advertising. The amount of personally identifiable information companies have about their customers is absolutely perverse. Some of the world’s largest companies are in the business of selling your personal information for use in advertising. This might sound innocuous but the tracking efforts of these companies are so accurate that many people believe that Facebook listens to their conversations to serve them relevant ads. Even if it’s true that the microphone is not used, the sum of all other data collected is still enough to show creepily relevant advertising.

Unfortunately, the author doesn’t seem to have come to the conclusion yet that it’s the logic of capitalism that go us here. Instead, he just points out that people’s privacy is being abused.

[P]eople now get most of their information from social networks yet these networks dictate the order in which content is served to the user. Google makes the worlds most popular mobile operating system and it’s purpose is drive the company’s bottom line (ad blocking is forbidden). “Smart” devices are everywhere and companies are jumping over each other to put more shit in your house so they can record your movements and sell the information to advertisers. This is all a blatant abuse of privacy that is completely toxic to society.

Agreed, and it's easy to feel a little helpless against this onslaught. While it's great to have a list of things that users can do, if those things are difficult to implement and/or hard to understand, then it's an uphill battle.

That being said, the three suggestions he makes are use

To combat this trend, I have taken the following steps and I think others should join the movement:

• Aggressively block all online advertisements
• Don’t succumb to the “curated” feeds
• Not every device needs to be “smart”

I feel I'm already way ahead of the author in this regard:

• Aggressively block all online advertisements
  • I use the Disconnect.me, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger desktop browser extensions, and Blokada on my Android device. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine on both.
• Don’t succumb to the “curated” feeds
  • I quit Facebook years ago, haven't got an Instagram account, and pretty much only post links to my own spaces on Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Not every device needs to be “smart”
  • I don't really use my Philips Hue lights, and don't have an Amazon Alexa — or even the Google Assistant on my phone).

It's not easy to stand up to Big Tech. The amount of money they pour into things make their 'innovations' seem inevitable. They can afford to make things cheap and frictionless so you get hooked.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that those that previously defended Apple as somehow ‘different’ on privacy, despite being the world’s most profitable company, are starting to backtrack.

Source: Nicholas Rempel