Thought Shrapnel

I’m certainly attending fewer conferences than I used to, but I thought that was just the changing nature of my work and ways of making a living.

Marco Arment makes some important points in this post about how conferences are just kind of outdated as a concept:

• Cost: With flights, lodging, and the ticket adding up to thousands of dollars per conference, most people are priced out. The vast majority of attendees’ money isn’t even going to the conference organizers or speakers — it’s going to venues, hotels, and airlines.
• Size: There’s no good size for a conference. Small conferences exclude too many people; big conferences impede socialization and logistics.
• Logistics: Planning and executing a conference takes such a toll on the organizers that few of them have ever lasted more than a few years.
• Format: Preparing formal talks with slide decks is a massively inefficient use of the speakers’ time compared to other modern methods of communicating ideas, and sitting there listening to blocks of talks for long stretches while you’re trying to stay awake after lunch is a pretty inefficient way to hear ideas.

This has always been the case, of course. It's just that technology-mediated ways of connecting, both synchronously and asynchronously, have improved:

Podcasts are a vastly more time-efficient way for people to communicate ideas than writing conference talks, and people who prefer crafting their message as a produced piece or with multimedia can do the same thing (and more) on YouTube. Both are much easier and more versatile for people to consume than conference talks, and they can reach and benefit far more people.

Conferences are by their very nature exclusive and take up a lot of people's time. There's still space for them, but I think time is up for the low-quality, just-for-the-sake-of-it conference.

Source: Marco.org

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

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

(Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

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

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

(Ursula Le Guin)

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)

Growing up, I always thought I’d write for a living. Initially, I wanted to be a journalist, but as it turns out, thinking and writing is about 75% of what I do on a weekly basis.

I’m always interested in how people who write full-time structure the process. This, from Jon McGregor, struck a chord with me:

There are other sorts of time, besides the writing time. There is thinking time, reading time, research time and sketching out ideas time. There is working on the first page over and over again until you find the tone you’re looking for time. There is spending just five minutes catching up on email time. There is spending five minutes more on Twitter because, in a way, that is part of the research process time. There is writing time, somewhere in there. There is making the coffee and clearing away the coffee and thinking about lunch and making the lunch and clearing away the lunch time. There is stretching the legs time. There is going for a long walk because all the great writers always talk about walking time being the best thinking time, and then there is getting back from that walk and realising what the hell the time is now time. There’s looking back over what you’ve written so far and deciding it is all a load of awkwardly phrased bobbins time; there is wondering what kind of a way this is to make a living at all time. There is finding the tail-end of an idea that might just work and trying to get that down on the page before you run out of time time. There is answering emails that just can’t be put off any longer time. There is moving to another table and setting a timer and refusing to look up from the page until you’ve written for 40 minutes solid time. There is reading that back and crossing it out time. And then there is running out of the door and trying to get to the school gates at anything like a decent time time.

I've written before, elsewhere, about how difficult it is for knowledge workers such as writers to quantify what counts as 'work'. Does a walk in the park while thinking about what you're going to write count? What about when you're in the shower planning something out?

It’s complicated.

Source: The Guardian

Despite no longer having a commute, I still find time to listen to podcasts. They’re useful for a variety of reasons: I can be doing something else while listening to them such as walking, going to the gym, or boring admin, and they don’t require me to look at a screen (which I do most of the day).

So it’s very useful for Bryan Alexander to share the podcasts he’s listening to at present. Here’s a couple that were new to me:

Beyond the Book – a look into the book publishing industry. It’s clearly biased in favor of strong copyright policies and practices, a bias I don’t share, but the program is also very informative.

Very Bad Wizards – two thinkers and, sometimes, a guest brood about deep questions concerning human psychology, philosophy, and ethics. It’s not my usual fare, so I enjoy learning.

Podcasts are basically RSS feeds with an audio enclosures as such, they can be exported as OPML files. Most podcast clients, including AntennaPod (which I use) allow you to do this.

Here’s my OPML file, as of today. I don’t listen to all of these podcasts regularly, just dipping in and out of them. My top five favourites are:

• Hurry Slowly — how you can be more productive by slowing down
• Hardcore History — an epic podcast about, you guessed it, history!
• BBC Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy — a fun roundup of the week's news (UK / international)
• Philosophy Bites — short interviews with philosophers
• Thinking Allowed — BBC Radio 4 sociology programme

There's also, obviously, Today In Digital Education (TIDE) which I record with Dai Barnes. Well be releasing our first episode of 2018 later this week!

Source: Bryan Alexander

This is excellent news:

Today we’re taking a major step to simplify online privacy with the launch of fully revamped versions of our browser extension and mobile app, now with built-in tracker network blocking, smarter encryption, and, of course, private search – all designed to operate seamlessly together while you search and browse the web. Our updated app and extension are now available across all major platforms – Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iOS, and Android – so that you can easily get all the privacy essentials you need on any device with just one download.

I have a multitude of blockers installed, which makes it difficult to recommend just one to people. Hopefully this will simplify things:

For the last decade, DuckDuckGo has been giving you the ability to search privately, but that privacy was only limited to our search box. Now, when you also use the DuckDuckGo browser extension or mobile app, we will provide you with seamless privacy protection on the websites you visit. Our goal is to expand this privacy protection over time by adding even more privacy features into this single package. While not all privacy protection can be as seamless, the essentials available today and those that we will be adding will go a long way to protecting your privacy online, without compromising your Internet experience.

It looks like the code is all open source, too! 👏 👏 👏

Source: DuckDuckGo blog

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 love this kind of stuff. As my daughter commented when I showed her, “we would be able to walk to Spain!”

The supercontinent of Pangea formed some 270 million years ago, during the Early Permian Period, and then began to break up 70 million years later, eventually yielding the continents we inhabit today. Pangea was, of course, a peopleless place. But if you were to drop today's nations on that great land mass, here's what it might look like.

Source: Open Culture

I’ll try and explain what Amazon Go is without sounding a note of incredulity and rolling my eyes. It’s a shop where shoppers submit to constant surveillance for the slim reward of not having to line up to pay. Instead, they enter the shop by identifying themselves via the Amazon app on their smartphone, and their shopping is then charged to their account.

Ben Thompson zooms out from this to think about the ‘game’ Amazon is playing here:

The economics of Amazon Go define the tech industry; the strategy, though, is uniquely Amazon’s. Most of all, the implications of Amazon Go explain both the challenges and opportunities faced by society broadly by the rise of tech.

He goes on to explain that Amazon really really likes fixed costs, which is what their new store provides. Yes, R&D is expensive, but then afterwards you can predict your costs, and concentrate on throughput:

Fixed costs, on the other hand, have no relation to revenue. In the case of convenience stores, rent is a fixed cost; 7-11 has to pay its lease whether it serves 100 customers or serves 1,000 in any given month. Certainly the more it serves the better: that means the store is achieving more “leverage” on its fixed costs.

In the case of Amazon Go specifically, all of those cameras and sensors and smartphone-reading gates are fixed costs as well — two types, in fact. The first is the actual cost of buying and installing the equipment; those costs, like rent, are incurred regardless of how much revenue the store ultimately produces.

Just as Amazon built amazingly scalable server technology and then opened it out as a platform for others to build websites and apps upon, so Thompson sees Amazon Go as the first move in the long game of providing technology to other shops/brands.

In market after market the company is leveraging software to build horizontal businesses that benefit from network effects: in e-commerce, more buyers lead to more suppliers lead to more buyers. In cloud services, more tenants lead to great economies of scale, not just in terms of servers and data centers but in the leverage gained by adding ever more esoteric features that both meet market needs and create lock-in... [T]he point of buying Whole Foods was to jump start a similar dynamic in groceries.

Thompson is no socialist, so I had a little chuckle at his reference to Marx towards the end of the article:

The political dilemma embedded in this analysis is hardly new: Karl Marx was born 200 years ago. Technology like Amazon Go is the ultimate expression of capital: invest massive amounts of money up front in order to reap effectively free returns at scale. What has fundamentally changed, though, is the role of labour: Marx saw a world where capital subjugated labour for its own return; technologies like Amazon Go have increasingly no need for labor at all.

He does have a point, though, and reading Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work convinced me that even ardent socialists should be advocating for full automation.

This is all related to points made about the changing nature of work by Harold Jarche in a new article he’s written:

As routine and procedural work gets automated, human work will be increasingly complex, requiring permanent skills for continuous learning and adaptation. Creativity and empathy will be more important than compliance and intelligence. This requires a rethinking of jobs, employment, and organizational management.

Some people worry that there won't be enough jobs to go around. However, the problem isn't employment, the problem is neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, and the fact that 1% of people own more than 55% of the rest of the planet.

Sources: Stratechery and Harold Jarche

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

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”

(Martin Luther King)

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”

(Martin Luther King)

Email is an open, federated standard. You can’t kill it.

The email inbox has become the modern day equivalent of the newsagent and offers a daily treasure trove of breaking news, analysis and inside information.

Newsletters, based on email, are a great bet for organisations, brands, and individuals looking to build an audience.

In 2011, The Financial Times asked “Is this the end of email?’ in an article highlighting the medium’s “inefficiency” as a business tool. Today, the FT serves its premium subscriber base with a portfolio of 43 email newsletters from “Brussels Briefing” to “FT Swamp Notes” (an insider’s guide to Donald Trump’s administration).

I very much enjoy publishing both this blog, and then curating the links into the weekly newsletter. I wish more people would do likewise!

Source: The Independent

This is a lovely post, full of insights and humour. A designer, now at Google but originally an intern at Apple, talks about the first iterations of their emoji.

My favourite part:

Sometimes our emoji turned out more comical than intended and some have a backstory. For example, Raymond reused his happy poop swirl as the top of the ice cream cone. Now that you know, bet you’ll never forget. No one else who discovered this little detail did either.

A fantastic read, really made my day.

Source: Angela Guzman

This is a lovely post, full of insights and humour. A designer, now at Google but originally an intern at Apple, talks about the first iterations of their emoji.

My favourite part:

Sometimes our emoji turned out more comical than intended and some have a backstory. For example, Raymond reused his happy poop swirl as the top of the ice cream cone. Now that you know, bet you’ll never forget. No one else who discovered this little detail did either.

A fantastic read, really made my day.

Source: Angela Guzman

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