New posts from thoughtshrapnel.com
Thought Shrapnel
We look through screens rather than at them
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the place where a famous artist, or musician, or writer was born/worked/died? Although it might be interesting on a surface level, the likelihood is that whoever it was escaped their environment into a world of imagination.
Less tedious to look at are artefacts such as notes, scribbled ideas and marginalia. What happens to all this, though, with a purely digital workflow? What will future historians have to work with? I’m guessing famous writers are similar to me: I don’t write letters to my wife, I sent her messages on Signal; I don’t scribble down ideas on scraps of paper, I make digital notes; I don’t scribble in books; I highlight sections on Kindle or Google Books.
More importantly—for a biographer or anyone trying to tell a good story—the digital version of a hastily scribbled note pinned to the apartment door is less tangible and thus harder to romanticize. Text messages still don’t evoke adventure, even if they are the invisible engine behind most of what happens. They inherently violate the “show don’t tell” rule; they are all telling and no showing. […]
Analog media may not convey information as efficiently, but it has other benefits that may be easier to appreciate in hindsight. It is more decorative. It furnishes the physical environment in a way that digital technology—always evolving toward smaller, smoother, and lighter—does not. Or to put it another way: When digital technology is visible it’s usually because it failed to be invisible. The exception to this is the ever-present screen, which remains visible by definition, obviously; screens now account for nearly all of a computer’s tangible presence in the world. And screens are the exception that prove the rule because, as Byung-Chul Han has noted, we look through them rather than at them. Screens don’t decorate the physical environment so much as they invite us to stare through a window into a different kind of non-place.
Source: Kneeling Bus
Against cyberlibertarianism
A long-ish and important post by Paris Marx in which he argues for a middle path between the ‘cyberlibertarianism’ of Silicon Valley and the China firewall approach. Just as the laws in most countries have a common based but a different flavour, so I think we’ll see an increasing alignment of what’s allowed online with what’s allowed offline in various jurisdictions.
Instead of solely fighting for digital rights, it’s time to expand that focus to digital sovereignty that considers not just privacy and speech, but the political economy of the internet and the rights of people in different countries to carve out their own visions for their digital futures that don’t align with a cyberlibertarian approach. When we look at the internet today, the primary threat we face comes from massive corporations and the billionaires that control them, and they can only be effectively challenged by wielding the power of government to push back on them. Ultimately, rights are about power, and ceding the power of the state to right-wing, anti-democratic forces is a recipe for disaster, not for the achievement of a libertarian digital utopia. We need to be on guard for when governments overstep, but the kneejerk opposition to internet regulation and disingenuous criticism that comes from some digital rights groups do us no good.
The actions of France and Brazil do have implications for speech, particularly in the case of Twitter/X, but sometimes those restrictions are justified — whether it’s placing stricter rules on what content is allowable on social media platforms, limiting when platforms can knowingly ignore criminal activity, and even banning platforms outright for breaching a country’s local rules. We’re entering a period where internet restrictions can’t just be easily dismissed as abusive actions taken by authoritarian governments, but one where they’re implemented by democratic states with the support of voting publics that are fed up with the reality of what the internet has become. They have no time for cyberlibertarian fantasies.
Counter to the suggestions that come out of the United States, the Chinese model is not the only alternative to Silicon Valley’s continued dominance. There is an opportunity to chart a course that rejects both, along with the pressures for surveillance, profit, and control that drive their growth and expansion. Those geopolitical rivals are a threat to any alternative vision that rejects the existing neo-colonial model of digital technology in favor of one that gives countries authority over the digital domain and the ability for their citizens to consider what tech innovation for the public good could look like. Digital sovereignty will look quite different from the digital world we’ve come to expect, but if the internet has any hope for a future, it’s a path we must fight to be allowed to take.
Source: Disconnect
Image: Tjeerd Royaards
Water use literacy
We’ve just started on a Mozilla-funded Friends of the Earth project at the moment around sustainability principles for AI. There seems to be a lot of noise around the amount of water employed to cool the data centres used to train large language models (LLMs).
While we should always be cognisant of the amount of the energy and water used to provide us with new (and existing) technologies, I think there’s a lack of statistical numeracy going on here. For example, in the UK, 51 litres of water per person are lost due to leakage every day. That’s over a trillion litres per year!
Alan Levine shared a link to this visualisation in the thread where I was discussing this stuff on the Fediverse.
Source: Information is Beautiful
Leadership, gender, and 'abusive supervision'
Prof. Ivona Hideg writes about a study she carried out during the pandemic around men and women leaders. While both experienced higher levels of anxiety, the amount of ‘abusive supervision’ was lower in women. The study was limited in terms of gender identification and sexual orientation, but it’s still interesting.
For me, this study supports what I have experienced in my career to date: women tend to be better at regulating their emotions, which the exact opposite of the stereotype of women in leadership positions.
In our research, we investigated 137 leader-report pairs working in Europe (primarily the Netherlands) in the service (38%), public (28%), or information and technology (23%) sectors during the early phases of the pandemic in 2020. The majority of leaders were men (56%), Dutch (59%), white (92%), and heterosexual (95%). The majority of direct reports were women (56%), Dutch (60%), white (89%), and heterosexual (88%). These leaders reported their emotions during the pandemic; their reports then rated their leaders’ behaviors.
Women leaders reported higher levels of anxiety regarding the pandemic than men leaders. There were no gender differences in feelings of hope toward the pandemic. When leaders’ anxiety was higher, so was their abusive supervision, whereas when leaders’ hope was higher, so was their family-supportive supervision. Critically, supporting our hypotheses, we found that these relationships between leaders’ emotions and behaviors depended on their gender. Leaders’ emotions were only related to their leadership behaviors if they were men, but not if they were women.
Namely, in line with gender role and emotional labor theory, women leaders engaged in low levels of abusive supervision regardless of how anxious they felt about the pandemic. By contrast, men leaders engaged in more abusive supervision, including behaviors such as being rude, ridiculing, yelling at, or lying to their reports when their anxiety was higher. Women leaders also provided high levels of family-supportive supervision irrespective of how hopeful they felt about the pandemic. By contrast, men leaders provided family-supportive supervision only when they felt more hopeful.
Source: Harvard Business Review
A landscape of havoc and fracture
The last paragraph of this post by Julian Stodd, which I discovered via OLDaily, points to something emancipatory about generative AI that I think some people may have missed:
An interesting feature of the Generative AI revolution is that whilst the technologies themselves are monumental, both in terms of complexity and physical energy and scale, it may well be individuals, at scale, who drive the true change. Not a single technology that breaks in, but rather people breaking out. Breaking out of restrictive and constrained structure.
Stodd is part of a doctoral programme, and (with no lack of hyperbole) discusses how his cohort is likely to be “the last to really read books… to really write for myself… to be confused and lost in thought.” He calls this a “landscape of havoc and fracture” and points to four dimensions of this shift:
Dialogic Engines – synchronous iteration and exploration of ideas, warping legacy ideas of trust, self doubt, foolishness, failure, and curiosity. As we wrote in ‘Engines of Enagement’, Generative AI makes high quality dialogue a commodity, but not simply as a service – it shifts the social context of such. So we can be in dialogue as a solo feature, removing all social judgement of curiosity and ignorance, if we dare.
Agentic Retrieval – not just a search engine, but a context setting system. These tools can shift the boundaries of context – not telling us what we asked for, but giving us what we may need. And from a perspective of virtually unbounded knowledge. We can factor this into our dialogue – asking for breadth and challenge to our thinking – or we may find it just lands. I think that systems shifting context is highly significant, as the fracture and evolution of context is a key part of insight and even paradigmatic change.
Trans-disciplinarity as the norm: our taxonomies of knowledge are not natural, but rather shaped by legacy mechanisms of need, discovery, ownership, and understanding. We have tended to segment our knowledge and hence structures of learning (as well as power, status, and identity) vertically around these themes. So we have engineers and poets, but not many poetic engineers. I think Generative AI changes this in significant ways, if we allow it to: permits a broadening of vocabulary and conception, a translation engine if you like, but also a provocative one – if we ask or if it offers.
The Primacy of Sense Making: I’ve said for some time that knowledge itself is shifting in the context of the Social Age, and Generative AI scales this change. The latest GenAI tools are Engines of Synthesis, reflection and contextualisation, leaving us in a radically broadened landscape of sense making as individual and collective feature. And I don’t think sense making per se is at threat of absorption by technology. Not that the Engines cannot make sense, just that our act of consumption is inherently linked to re-contextualisation and insight. In other words, if the technology has already chewed it over, we will chew it over again. It just broadens the space and foundations for us to do so.
I’ve been using GPT-4o for my MSc and it’s so much better and deeper to learn with an assistant than to rely on what’s provided to you as a student, and what you can discover by just wading through books and articles.
Source: Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog
A countercultural perspective to the capitalist notion of 'productivity'
This article examines how religious communities, particularly nuns and monks, approach productivity differently from the modern, output-driven culture. It highlights how members of religious orders redefine productivity as rooted in spiritual fulfilment, sufficiency, and human connection rather than constant work and economic gain.
These experiences suggest that true productivity lies in fruitfulness and grace, not in relentless efficiency, which offers somewhat of a countercultural perspective to the capitalist emphasis on always doing more.
We are conditioned to listen to podcasts while washing up, read books on the commute and dash out emails while drinking a morning coffee. I can’t even ‘just’ watch a Netflix show without needing something else to do, so resort to doing cross stitch in front of the TV in order to put my phone down. This is the efficiency for which we congratulate ourselves, getting more done in the same time. I draw the line at the growing trend for listening to podcasts at double speed to inhale the same information more efficiently, less fruitfully.
When I first raised the idea of writing this piece, and put out the rather niche call for nuns, priests and monks willing to be interviewed about productivity culture, I was struck by the number of responses from people desperate to read it. The desire for wisdom about life and work that isn’t geared just towards increasing the latter is real.
There were points in every one of the conversations I had with Sister Liz, Sister Gabriel, Father Thomas and Father Sam, in the middle of my working day, that felt like a mirror being held up, both gently and painfully, to the busyness and imbalance of my own life. If Melville was right that nothing is what it is except for contrast, then the lessons of the religious life for those of us grappling with the need to be ‘productive’ are surely our greatest example.
Source: THEOS