- Britain tamed Big Tech and nobody noticed (WIRED)
- Twitter Arguments (OneZero)
- I wish the fediverse had ‘circles’ (Ru Singh)
And so it continues...
As we start the run-up to a General Election in the UK (date still to be announced) the deepfakes will ramp up in intensity. This one is a purported audio clip, but I should imagine in six months' time there will be video clips that fool lots of people.
What with X divesting itself of seemingly all safeguards, there are going to be a lot of people who are fooled, especially those with with poor information literacy skills and a vested interest in believing lies which fit their worldview.
An audio clip posted to social media on Sunday, purporting to show Britain’s opposition leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, has been debunked as being AI-generated by private-sector and British government analysis.Source: UK opposition leader targeted by AI-generated fake audio smear | The RecordThe audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.
Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender — a deepfake detection business — disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: “We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that’s been going around (a transcoding).
[…]
Simon Clarke, a Conservative Party MP, warned on social media: “There is a deep fake audio circulating this morning of Keir Starmer - ignore it.” The security minister Tom Tugendhat, also a Conservative MP, also warned of the “fake audio recording” and implored Twitter users not to “forward to amplify it.”
Organisations are not just joining the Fediverse, they're setting up their own instances
It’s great to see that Raspberry Pi Ltd. and other organisations are setting up their own servers. Not only does it enable them to verify themselves, but that of their employees and affiliates really easily.
I’m sure it won’t all be smooth sailing ahead for the Fediverse, especially when it comes to trust and verification. But I’m optimistic that the recent migration from Twitter is ultimately for the good of the human species.
We’ve opted to host our own instance. We’ve done this because, with multiple instances out there, we had to decide how to make sure people following us knew that our Raspberry Pi account was the “real” one.Source: An escape pod was jettisoned during the fighting | Raspberry PiDistributed systems are an interesting corner case when it comes to trust. Because when it comes to identity, you eventually have to trust someone. Whether that’s a corporation, like Twitter, or a government, or the person themselves. Trust is needed.
With Mastodon the root of trust for identity is the admin of the instance you’re on, and the admins on all the other instances, where you’re trusting them to remove “fake” accounts. Or, if you’re running your own instance, then it’s the domain name registrars. The details of our domain registration of the
raspberrypi.social
domain may be redacted for privacy, but our domain registrar knows who we are, and is the same registrar we use for all our other domains. They trust our government-issued identity to prove that we are Raspberry Pi Ltd. You can trust them, they trust the government, and ultimately the government trusts us because they can use Ultima Ratio Regum, the last argument of kings.
Microcast #091 — Arguing in circles
Overview
An eclectic mix of articles in today's microcast, covering everything from teens and tech to Fediverse functionality.
Show notes
Image via Pexels
Background music: Shimmers by Synth Soundscapes (aka Mentat)
Online personas and liquid modernity
Drew Austin references Zygmunt Bauman, an author I referenced in my thesis, in relation to personhood and social media. Really interesting.
Austin’s blog, which he seems to have abandoned in favour of a newsletter, discussed his friend recommending the creation of an an ‘alt’ persona “in order to break free of some of the restrictions that an online persona imposes.” I find this interesting in light of my thinking about nuking everything and starting again.
(PS what are we calling Substack newsletter displayed on the internet these days? I think I’ll just call them web pages.)
In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Bauman wrote: “Seen from a distance, (other people’s) existence seems to possess a coherence and a unity which they cannot have, in reality, but which seems evident to the spectator. This, of course, is an optical illusion. The distance (that is, the paucity of our knowledge) blurs the details and effaces everything that fits ill into the Gestalt. Illusion or not, we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art. And having seen them this way, we struggle to (make our lives) the same.”Source: #162: Minimum Viable Self | Kneeling Bus[…]
As Bauman presciently realized, the constraints of these digital environments and the sheer volume of users endows even the flimsiest online presences with an illusion of unity. Showing up frequently enough in the feed might elevate one’s presence to a work of art, at least from everyone else’s distracted perspective, and this in turn motivates us all to present our own selves more artfully. The speed of the information flow is essential to the entire illusion: A platform like Twitter makes our asynchronous posts feel like real-time interaction by delivering them in such rapid succession, and that illusion begets another more powerful one, that we’re all actually present within the feed.
[…]
Something I frequently joke about—a dark truth that begs for humor—is how social media requires continuous posting just to remind everyone else you exist. I once said that if Twitter was real life our bodies would always be slowly shrinking, and tweeting more would be the only way to make ourselves bigger again. We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood. Reality, as Philip K. Dick said, is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it, and while the digital and physical worlds may be converging as a hybridized domain of lived experience and outward perception, our own sustained presence as individuals is the quality that distinguishes the two.
Of all lies, art is the least untrue
The world doesn't particularly need my opinions on NFTs ('non-fungible tokens') as there's plenty of opinions to go round in other newsletters, podcasts, and blog posts.
After doing a bunch of reading, though, I think that the main use case for NFTs will be ticket sales. That is to say, when there is a limited supply of something with intrinsic value, and both the original buyer and seller want to ensure authenticity.
The rest is speculation and gambling, as far as I'm concerned, with a side serving of ecological destruction. I'm also a bit concerned about the enforcement of copyright everywhere on the web it might lead to...
Twitter's Dorsey auctions first ever tweet as digital memorabilia — "The post, sent from Dorsey’s account in March of 2006, received offers on Friday that went as high as $88,888.88 within minutes of the Twitter co-founder tweeting a link to the listing on ‘Valuables by Cent’ - a tweets marketplace."
NFTs, explained — “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different. You gave up a Squirtle, and got a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk calls “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards.” (I’ll take their word for it.)"
NFTs are a dangerous trap — "The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time they’ll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value. They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. Because that’s the only reason that someone is likely to buy one–like a stock, they hope it will go up in value. Unlike some stocks, it doesn’t pay dividends or come with any other rights. And unlike actual works of art, NFTs aren’t usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they simply represent something that is."
Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining — "Results indicate that in 2018, each $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US and $0.37 in China. The similar value in China relative to the US occurs despite the extremely large disparity between the value of a statistical life estimate for the US relative to that of China. Further, with each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefits, absent perpetual price increases."
HERE IS THE ARTICLE YOU CAN SEND TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAY “BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?” — "Much like the world of blue chip, some NFTs may be bought and sold simply as artworks, intended for personal collections and acquired for aesthetic, conceptual, or personal reasons. However, every single one is made from the outset to be liquidated- an asset first, artwork second. They are images attached to dollar figures, not the other way around."
Quotation-as-title by Gustave Flaubert. Image of Nyan Cat, a 2011 meme, which sold as an NFT for ~$600,000 recently.