Thought Shrapnel

I’ve followed the IndieWeb movement since its inception, but it’s always seemed a bit niche. I love (and use) the POSSE model, for example, but expecting everyone to have domain of their own stacked with open source software seems a bit utopian right now.

I was surprised and delighted, therefore, to see a post on the GoDaddy blog extolling the virtues of the IndieWeb for business owners. The author explains that the IndieWeb movement was born of frustration:

Frustration from software developers who like the idea of social media, but who do not want to hand over their content to some big, unaccountable internet company that unilaterally decides who gets to see what.

Frustration from writers and content creators who do not want a third party between them and the people they want to reach.

Frustration from researchers and journalists who need a way to get their message out without depending on the whim of a big company that monitors, and sometimes censors, what they have to say.

He does a great job of explaining, with an appropriate level of technical detail, how to get started. The thing I'd really like to see in particular is people publishing details of events at a public URL instead of (just) on Facebook:

Importantly, with IndieAuth, you can log into third-party websites using your own domain name. And your visitors can log into your website with their domain name. Or, if you organize events, you can post your event announcement right on your website, and have attendees RSVP either from their own IndieWeb sites, or natively on a social site.

A recommended read. I'll be pointing people to this in future!

Source: GoDaddy

Mike Caulfield reflects on Facebook’s announcement that they’re going to allow users to rate the sources of news in terms of trustworthiness. Like me, and most people who have thought about this for more than two seconds, he thinks it’s a bad idea.

Instead, he thinks Facebook should try Google’s approach:

Most people misunderstand what the Google system looks like (misreporting on it is rife) but the way it works is this. Google produces guidance docs for paid search raters who use them to rate search results (not individual sites). These documents are public, and people can argue about whether Google’s take on what constitutes authoritative sources is right — because they are public.

Facebook's algorithms are opaque by design, whereas, Caulfield argues, Google's approach is documented:

I’m not saying it doesn’t have problems — it does. It has taken Google some time to understand the implications of some of their decisions and I’ve been critical of them in the past. But I am able to be critical partially because we can reference a common understanding of what Google is trying to accomplish and see how it was falling short, or see how guidance in the rater docs may be having unintended consequences.

This is one of the major issues of our time, particularly now that people have access to the kind of CGI only previously available to Hollywood. And what are they using this AI-powered technology for? Fake celebrity (and revenge) porn, of course.

Source: Hapgood

Remote working, which I’ve done for over five years now, sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Open your laptop while still in bed, raid the biscuit barrel at every opportunity, spend more time with your family…

Don’t get me wrong, it is great and I don’t think I could ever go back to working full-time in an office. That being said, there’s a hidden side to remote working which no-one ever tells you about: anxiety.

Every interaction when you’re working remotely is an intentional act. You either have to schedule a meeting with someone, or ‘ping’ them to see if they’re available. You can’t see that they’re free, wander over to talk to them, or bump into them in the corridor, as you could if you were physically co-located.

When people don’t respond in a timely fashion, or within the time frame you were expecting, it’s unclear why that happened. This article picks up on that:

In recent decades, written communication has caught up—or at least come as close as it’s likely to get to mimicking the speed of regular conversation (until they implant thought-to-text microchips in our brains). It takes more than 200 milliseconds to compose a text, but it’s not called “instant” messaging for nothing: There is an understanding that any message you send can be replied to more or less immediately.

But there is also an understanding that you don’t have to reply to any message you receive immediately. As much as these communication tools are designed to be instant, they are also easily ignored. And ignore them we do. Texts go unanswered for hours or days, emails sit in inboxes for so long that “Sorry for the delayed response” has gone from earnest apology to punchline.

It’s not just work, either. Because we carry our smartphones with us everywhere, my wife expects almost an instantaneous response on even the most trivial matters. I’ve come back to my phone with a stream of ‘oi’ messages before…

It’s anxiety-inducing because written communication is now designed to mimic conversation—but only when it comes to timing. It allows for a fast back-and-forth dialogue, but without any of the additional context of body language, facial expression, and intonation. It’s harder, for example, to tell that someone found your word choice off-putting, and thus to correct it in real-time, or try to explain yourself better. When someone’s in front of you, “you do get to see the shadow of your words across someone else’s face,” [Sherry] Turkle says.

Lots to ponder here. A lot of it has to do with the culture of your organisation / family, at the end of the day.

Source: The Atlantic (via Hurry Slowly)

This year is a time of reckoning for the world’s most popular social network. From their own website (which I’ll link to via archive.org because I don’t link to Facebook). Note the use of the passive voice:

Facebook was originally designed to connect friends and family — and it has excelled at that. But as unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium, it’s being used in unforeseen ways with societal repercussions that were never anticipated.

It's pretty amazing that a Facebook spokesperson is saying things like this:

I wish I could guarantee that the positives are destined to outweigh the negatives, but I can’t. That’s why we have a moral duty to understand how these technologies are being used and what can be done to make communities like Facebook as representative, civil and trustworthy as possible.

What they are careful to do is to paint a picture of Facebook as somehow 'neutral' and being 'hijacked' by bad actors. This isn't actually the case.

As an article in The Guardian points out, executives at Facebook and Twitter aren’t exactly heavy users of their own platforms:

It is a pattern that holds true across the sector. For all the industry’s focus on “eating your own dog food”, the most diehard users of social media are rarely those sitting in a position of power.

These sites are designed to be addictive. So, just as drug dealers "don't get high on their own supply", so those designing social networks know what they're dealing with:

These addictions haven’t happened accidentally... Instead, they are a direct result of the intention of companies such as Facebook and Twitter to build “sticky” products, ones that we want to come back to over and over again. “The companies that are producing these products, the very large tech companies in particular, are producing them with the intent to hook. They’re doing their very best to ensure not that our wellbeing is preserved, but that we spend as much time on their products and on their programs and apps as possible. That’s their key goal: it’s not to make a product that people enjoy and therefore becomes profitable, but rather to make a product that people can’t stop using and therefore becomes profitable.

The trouble is that this advertising-fuelled medium which is built to be addictive, is the place where most people get their news these days. Facebook has realised that it has a problem in this regard so they've made the decision to pass the buck to users. Instead of Facebook, or anyone else, deciding which news sources an individual should trust, it's being left up to users.

While this sounds empowering and democratic, I can’t help but think it’s a bad move. As The Washington Post notes:

“They want to avoid making a judgment, but they are in a situation where you can’t avoid making a judgment,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. “They are looking for a safe approach. But sometimes you can be in a situation where there is no safe route out.”

The article continues to cite former Facebook executives who think that the problems are more than skin-deep:

They say that the changes the company is making are just tweaks when, in fact, the problems are a core feature of the Facebook product, said Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook privacy operations manager.

“If they demote stories that get a lot of likes, but drive people toward posts that generate conversation, they may be driving people toward conversation that isn’t positive,” Parakilas said.

A final twist in the tale is that Rupert Murdoch, a guy who has no morals but certainly has a valid point here, has made a statement on all of this:

If Facebook wants to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies. The publishers are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content but are not being adequately rewarded for those services. Carriage payments would have a minor impact on Facebook’s profits but a major impact on the prospects for publishers and journalists.”

2018 is going to be an interesting year. If you want to quit Facebook and/or Twitter be part of something better, why not join me on Mastodon via social.coop and help built Project MoodleNet?

Sources: Facebook newsroom / The Guardian / The Washington Post / News Corp

I have to say, I was quite dismissive of the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when I first heard about it. I thought it was going to be another debacle like the ‘this website uses cookies’ thing.

However, I have to say I’m impressed with what’s going to happen in May. It’s going to have a worldwide impact, too — as this article explains:

For an even shorter tl;dr the [European Commission's] theory is that consumer trust is essential to fostering growth in the digital economy. And it thinks trust can be won by giving users of digital services more information and greater control over how their data is used. Which is — frankly speaking — a pretty refreshing idea when you consider the clandestine data brokering that pervades the tech industry. Mass surveillance isn’t just something governments do.

It’s a big deal:

[GDPR is] set to apply across the 28-Member State bloc as of May 25, 2018. That means EU countries are busy transposing it into national law via their own legislative updates (such as the UK’s new Data Protection Bill — yes, despite the fact the country is currently in the process of (br)exiting the EU, the government has nonetheless committed to implementing the regulation because it needs to keep EU-UK data flowing freely in the post-brexit future. Which gives an early indication of the pulling power of GDPR.

...and unlike other regulations, actually has some teeth:

The maximum fine that organizations can be hit with for the most serious infringements of the regulation is 4% of their global annual turnover (or €20M, whichever is greater). Though data protection agencies will of course be able to impose smaller fines too. And, indeed, there’s a tiered system of fines — with a lower level of penalties of up to 2% of global turnover (or €10M

I'm having conversations about it wherever I go, from my work at Moodle (an company headquartered in Australia) to the local Scouts.

Source: TechCrunch

What this article calls ‘Decentralisation 2.0’ is actually redecentralising the web. There’s an urgent need:

A huge percentage of today’s communications flows through channels owned by a few entities, which in turn do all they can to influence these communications. Google alone comprises 25 percent of all US internet traffic right now, and has access to millions upon millions of users’ personal information. Where the internet was once seen as a tool for more societal freedom, it has come to represent the opposite.

The author takes aim at the so-called 'sharing economy' which, sonewhat paradoxically, actually entrenches centralisation, as companies like Airbnb and Uber exercise a lot of control over their platforms:

Counterintuitively, this is only possible because of a high degree of centralization: the company owns the identity of its participants, the transportation logistics, the payment mechanisms, the pricing, and the rules that govern the marketplace

The author has experience of bottom-up activism in Russia, usurping dominant players promoting unfair practices. I like his optimism about blockchain-based technologies. I don't necessarily share it, but we can hope:

True decentralization is fast approaching. Before long, we will see it in public administration, finance, real estate, insurance, transportation, and other key areas — often enabled by the blockchain technology. Its purpose is not to destroy centralized systems, but to create extra relationships on top of them. While maintaining the advantages of conventional platforms, decentralization 2.0 will reduce people’s dependence on mediators.

Source: The Next Web

I’ve started buying the Financial Times Weekend along with The Observer each Sunday. Annoyingly, while the latter doesn’t have a paywall, the FT does which means although I can quote from, and link to, this article by Simon Kuper about tribal politics, many of you won’t be able to read it in full.

Kuper makes the point that in a world of temporary jobs, ‘broken’ families, and declining church attendance, social networks provide a place where people can find their ‘tribe’:

Online, each tribe inhabits its own filter bubble of partisan news. To blame this only on Facebook is unfair. If people wanted a range of views, they could install both rightwing and leftwing feeds on their Facebook pages — The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, say. Most people choose not to, partly because they like living in their tribe. It makes them feel less lonely.

There's a lot to agree with in this article. I think we can blame people for getting their news mainly through Facebook. I think we can roll our eyes at people who don't think carefully about their information environment.

On the other hand, social networks are mediated by technology. And technology is never neutral. For example, Facebook has gone from saying that it couldn’t possibly be blamed for ‘fake news’ (2016) to investigating the way that Russian accounts may have manipulated users (2017) to announcing that they’re going to make some changes (2018, NSFW language in link).

We need to zoom out from specific problems in our society to the wider issues that underpin them. Kuper does this to some extent in this article, but the FT isn’t the place where you’ll see a robust criticism of the problems with capitalism. Social networks can, and have, been different — just think of what Twitter was like before becoming a publicly-traded company, for example.

My concern is that we need to sort out these huge, society-changing companies before they become too large to regulate.

Source: FT Weekend

Another fantastic article from Tim Carmody, a.k.a. Dr. Time:

An Echo or an iPhone is not a friend, and it is not a pet. It is an alarm clock that plays video games. It has no sentience. It has no personality. It’s a string of canned phrases that can’t understand what I’m saying unless I’m talking to it like I’m typing on the command line. It’s not genuinely interactive or conversational. Its name isn’t really a name so much as an opening command phrase. You could call one of these virtual assistants “sudo” and it would make about as much sense.

However.

I have also watched a lot (and I mean a lot) of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And while I feel pretty comfortable talking about “it” in the context of the speaker that’s sitting on the table across the room—there’s even a certain rebellious jouissance to it, since I’m spiting the technology companies whose products I use but whose intrusion into my life I resent—I feel decidedly uncomfortable declaring once and for all time that any and all AI assistants can be reduced to an “it.” It forecloses on a possibility of personhood and opens up ethical dilemmas I’d really rather avoid, even if that personhood seems decidedly unrealized at the moment.

I’m really enjoying his new ‘column’ as well as Noticing, the newsletter he curates.

Source: kottke.org

This is crazy.

In a presentation at Usenix's Enigma 2018 security conference in California, Google software engineer Grzegorz Milka today revealed that, right now, less than 10 per cent of active Google accounts use two-step authentication to lock down their services. He also said only about 12 per cent of Americans have a password manager to protect their accounts, according to a 2016 Pew study.

Two-factor authentication (2FA), especially the kind where you use an app authenticator is so awesome you can use a much weaker password than normal, should you wish. (I, however, stick to the 16-digit one created by a deterministic password manager.)

Please, if you haven't already done so, just enable two-step authentication. This means when you or someone else tries to log into your account, they need not only your password but authorization from another device, such as your phone. So, simply stealing your password isn't enough – they need your unlocked phone, or similar, to to get in.

I can't understand people who basically live their lives permanently one step away from being hacked. And for what? A very slightly more convenient life? Mad.

Source: The Register

I’m a big fan of The Book of Life, a project of The School of Life. One of the latest updates to this project is about the pervasive use of smartphones in society.

To say we are addicted to our phones is not merely to point out that we use them a lot. It signals a darker notion: that we use them to keep our own selves at bay. Because of our phones, we may find ourselves incapable of sitting alone in a room with our own thoughts floating freely in our own heads, daring to wander into the past and the future, allowing ourselves to feel pain, desire, regret and excitement.

I feel this. I want my mind to wander, but I also kind of want to be informed. I want to be entertained.

We have to check our phones of course but we also need to engage directly with others, to be relaxed, immersed in nature and present. We need to let our minds wander off of their own accord. We need to go through the threshold of boredom to renew our acquaintance with ourselves.

The diminutive digital assistants in our pockets do our bidding and unlock a multitude of possibilities.

Our phone, however, is docile, responsive to our touch, always ready to spring to life and willing to do whatever we want. Its malleability provides the perfect excuse for disengagement from the trickier aspects of other people. It’s almost not that rude to give it a quick check – just possibly we might actually need to keep track of how a news story is unfolding; a friend in another country may have just had a baby or someone we vaguely know might have bought a new pair of shoes in the last few minutes.

It’s a cliché to say that it’s the small things in life that make it worth living, but it’s true.

Our phones seem to deliver the world directly to us. Yet (without our noticing) they often limit the things we actually pay attention to. As we look down towards our palms we don’t realise we are forgetting:

• The curious delicacy of a friend’s wrist
• The soothing sound of traffic in the distance
• Moss on an old stone wall
• The pleasure of feeling tired after working hard
• The excitement of getting up very early on a summer’s morning, in order to have an hour entirely to oneself.
• A bank of clouds gradually drifting across the sky
• The texture and smell and colour of a ripe fig
• The shy hesitancy of someone’s smile
• How nice it is to read in the bath
• The comfort of an old jumper (with holes under the armpits)

Every technology is a ‘bridging’ technology in the sense of coming after something less sophisticated, and before something more sophisticated. My hope is that we iterate towards, rather than away, from what makes us human.

We are still so far from inventing the technology we really require for us to flourish; capitalism has delivered only on the simplest of our needs. We can summon up the street map of Lyons but not a diagram of what our partner is really thinking and feeling; the phone will help us follow fifteen news outlets but not help us know when we’ve spent more than enough time doing so; it emphatically refuses to distinguish between the most profound needs of our soul and a passing fancy.

As ever, a fantastic article.

Source: The Book of Life

The Verge reports back from CES, the yearly gathering where people usually get excited about shiny thing. This year, however, people are bit more wary…

And it’s not just privacy and security that people need to think about. There’s also lock-in. You can’t just buy a connected gadget, you have to choose an ecosystem to live in. Does it work with HomeKit? Will it work with Alexa? Will some tech company get into a spat with another tech company and pull its services from that hardware thing you just bought?

In other words, the kind of digital literacies required by the average consumer just went up a notch.

Here’s the thing: it’s unlikely that the connected toothpaste will go back in the tube at this point. Consumer products will be more connected, not less. Some day not long from now, the average person’s stroll down the aisle at Target or Best Buy will be just like our experiences at futuristic trade shows: everything is connected, and not all of it makes sense.

It won't be long before we'll be inviting techies around to debug our houses...

Source: The Verge

This is fantastic:

The Revolve is a full-size 26-inch spoked wheel that can be folded to a third its diameter and 60 percent less space, and back again in an instant, and its commercial availability will offer new design possibilities for folding bicycles, folding wheelchairs and many other vehicles that need to be transported in compact form.

A real game-change in terms of accessibility, I reckon.

Source: New Atlas

This is fantastic:

The Revolve is a full-size 26-inch spoked wheel that can be folded to a third its diameter and 60 percent less space, and back again in an instant, and its commercial availability will offer new design possibilities for folding bicycles, folding wheelchairs and many other vehicles that need to be transported in compact form.

A real game-change in terms of accessibility, I reckon.

Source: New Atlas

I missed the Mozilla Festival at the end of October 2017 as I’d already booked my family holiday by the time they announced the dates.

It’s always a great event and attracts some super-smart people doing some great thinking and creating on and with the open web.

Mark Boas co-curated the Decentralisation Space at MozFest, and recently wrote up his experiences.

Sessions incorporated various types of media, from photography and other visual artforms, through board games to hand assembled systems made out of ping-pong balls and straws. Some discussions dove into the nitty gritty of decentralising the web, many required no prior knowledge of the subject.

His post, which mentions the session that was run by my co-op colleagues John Bevan and Bryan Mathers, is a veritable treasure trove of resources to explore further.

Source: maboa.it

You’d think with anyone, anywhere, being able to post anything to a global audience, that this would be a golden age of free speech. Right?

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? Was it maybe even generated with the help of artificial intelligence? (Yes, there are systems that can create increasingly convincing fake videos.)

The problem is not with the free speech, it's the means by which it's disseminated:

In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

It's time to re-decentralise, people.

Source: WIRED

Algorithms and artificial intelligence are an increasingly-normal part of our everyday lives, notes this article, so the next step is in the workplace:

Each one of us is becoming increasingly more comfortable being advised by robots for everything from what movie to watch to where to put our retirement. Given the groundwork that has been laid for artificial intelligence in companies, it’s only a matter of time before the $60 billion consulting industry in the U.S. is going to be disrupted by robotic advisors.

I remember years ago being told that by 2020 it would be normal to have an algorithm on your team. It sounded fanciful at the time, but now we just take it for granted:

Robo-advisors have the potential to deliver a broader array of advice and there may be a range of specialized tools in particular decision domains. These robo-advisors may be used to automate certain aspects of risk management and provide decisions that are ethical and compliant with regulation. In data-intensive fields like marketing and supply chain management, the results and decisions that robotic algorithms provide is likely to be more accurate than those made by human intuition.

I'm kind of looking forward to this becoming a reality, to be honest. Let machines do what machines are good at, and humans do what humans are good at would be my mantra.

Source: Harvard Business Review

Cory Doctorow writes:

There is a war for your attention, and like all adversarial scenarios, the sides develop new countermeasures and then new tactics to overcome those countermeasures.

Using a metaphor from virology, he notes that we become to immune to certain types of manipulation over time:

When a new attentional soft spot is discovered, the world can change overnight. One day, every­one you know is signal boosting, retweeting, and posting Upworthy headlines like “This video might hurt to watch. Luckily, it might also explain why,” or “Most Of These People Do The Right Thing, But The Guys At The End? I Wish I Could Yell At Them.” The style was compelling at first, then reductive and simplistic, then annoying. Now it’s ironic (at best). Some people are definitely still susceptible to “This Is The Most Inspiring Yet Depressing Yet Hilarious Yet Horrifying Yet Heartwarming Grad Speech,” but the rest of us have adapted, and these headlines bounce off of our attention like pre-penicillin bacteria being batted aside by our 21st century immune systems.

However, the thing I’m concerned about is the kind of AI-based manipulation that is forever shape-shifting. How do we become immune to a moving target?

Source: Locus magazine