Thought Shrapnel

Great post by Seth Godin:

Yes, we frequently sell ourselves too short. We don't ask for compensation commensurate with the value we create. It's a form of hiding. But the most common form of this hiding is not merely lowering the price. No, the mistake we make is in not telling stories that create more value, in not doing the hard work of building something unique and worth seeking out.

Create stuff that people value and that is in scarce supply. Focus on leaving the world a better place than you found it.

Source: Seth’s blog

There’s not much we mere mortals can do about the latest microprocessor-based vulnerabilites, except ensure we apply security patches immediately.

Source: xkcd

As someone who has suffered in the past from depression, and still occasionally suffers from anxiety, I find this an interesting article:

If you are depressed and anxious, you are not a machine with malfunctioning parts. You are a human being with unmet needs. The only real way out of our epidemic of despair is for all of us, together, to begin to meet those human needs – for deep connection, to the things that really matter in life.

Meaningful work is important. Our neoliberal economy is removing much of this under the auspices of 'efficiency'.

Source: The Guardian

Email is an awesome system. It’s open, decentralised, and you can pick whoever you want to provide your emails. The trouble is, of course, that if you decide you don’t want a certain company, say Google, to read your emails, you only have control of your half of the equation. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to use GMail, if most of your contacts do.

The same is true of AI assistant. You might not want an Amazon Echo device in your house, but you don’t spend all your life at home:

Amazon wants to bring Alexa to more devices than smart speakers, Fire TV and various other consumer electronics for the home, like alarm clocks. The company yesterday announced developer tools that would allow Alexa to be used in microwave ovens, for example – so you could just tell the oven what to do. Today, Amazon is rolling out a new set of developer tools, including one called the “Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit,” that would allow Alexa to work Bluetooth products in the wearable space, like headphones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, other audio devices, and more.

The future isn't pre-ordained. We get to choose the society and culture in which we'd like to live. Huge, for-profit companies having listening devices everywhere sounds dystopian to me.

Source: TechCrunch

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I’m wondering whether to delete all my social media accounts, or whether I should stay and fight. The trouble is, no technology is neutral, it always contains biases.

It’s interesting how the narrative has changed since the 2011 revolutions in Iran and Egypt:

Because of the advent of social media, the story seemed to go, tyrants would fall and democracy would rule. Social media communications were supposed to translate into a political revolution, even though we don’t necessarily agree on what a positive revolution would look like. The process is overtly emotional: The outrage felt translates directly, thanks to the magic of social media, into a “rebellion” that becomes democratic governance.

But social media has not helped these revolutions turn into lasting democracies. Social media speaks directly to the most reactive, least reflective parts of our minds, demanding we pay attention even when our calmer selves might tell us not to. It is no surprise that this form of media is especially effective at promoting hate, white supremacy, and public humiliation.

In my new job at Moodle, I’m tasked with leading work around a new social network for educators focused on sharing Open Educational Resources and professional development. I think we’ll start to see more social networks based around content than people (think Pinterest rather than Facebook).

Source: Motherboard

As an historian, I find this fascinating:

So why are Spaniards living behind their geographic time zone?

In 1940, General Francisco Franco changed Spain’s time zone, moving the clocks one hour forward in solidarity with Nazi Germany.

For Spaniards, who at the time were utterly devastated by the Spanish Civil War, complaining about the change did not even cross their minds. They continued to eat at the same time, but because the clocks had changed, their 1pm lunches became 2pm lunches, and they were suddenly eating their 8pm dinners at 9pm.

We were talking over Sunday dinner today how some traditions and practices can stick within families and organisations without them being questioned for years. This is an extreme example!

Source: BBC Travel

To have a settled position on anything is anachronistic. There has to be an element of ambiguity in your work and thinking, otherwise you’re dealing in what Richard Rorty called ‘dead metaphors’.

Foucault understood this by never espousing a theory of power:

Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.

By not spending time defending your own position, you have time to recognise and critique what you see you be wrong and insidious in the world:

Foucault’s skeptical supposition thus allowed him to conduct careful enquiries into the actual functions of power. What these studies reveal is that power, which easily frightens us, turns out to be all the more cunning because its basic forms of operation can change in response to our ongoing efforts to free ourselves from its grip.

I'm reading China Miéville's October: The Story of the Russian Revolution at the moment. It's making me re-realise that power is never given, it's always taken.

Source: Aeon

I feel like I could have written this post. I agree entirely:

Some of the phenomena governing people's schedules are natural. It does get dark at night and people do need light. It gets cold in the winter and people need heating. But the Earth does not care whether it's the weekday or the weekend, a Wednesday or a Saturday. And yet somehow the society has decreed that Wednesday is a serious business day and any adult roaming the streets during daytime on that day might get weird stares.

As the author points out, knowledge work doesn't depend on people doing it at the same time. In fact, the title of his post is 'Against the synchronous society':

Perhaps there's no need for people in the workplace to expect others to be able to instantly respond to them. In fact, slower, asynchronous communication can lead to more robust institutional memory inside of an organisation. Instead of the easy fix of tapping a colleague on the shoulder to get an answer, the worker might instead devise a solution for an issue themselves or figure it out while typing up an email, adding to the documentation and making sure fewer people have that question in the future.

Great stuff. I, for one, am looking forward to a time when we're collectively spend a bit more time reflecting, and a bit less time (knee-jerk) responding.

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As an aside, the software running the blog, Kimonote, looks interesting:

Kimonote is a fancy plain text organizer, a macroblogging platform and an antisocial network. It supports Markdown, which allows for a consistent look-and-feel no matter whether you're looking at your own private notes or someone else's public posts. Additional niceties are available, such as a table of contents.

Source: mildbyte

I visit Product Hunt on a regular basis. While there’s plenty of examples of hyped apps and services that don’t last six months, there’s also some gems in there, especially in the Open Source section!

There’s a Q&A part of the site where this week I unearthed a great thread about privacy-based browser extensions. The top ones were:

• Ghostery
• uBlock Origin
• Adblock Plus
• Search Encrypt
• Disconnect

The comments and shared experiences are particularly useful. Remember, the argument that you don’t need privacy because you’ve got nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need free speech because you’ve got nothing to say…

Source: Product Hunt

Twitter have confirmed what everyone knew all along: they’re not going to ban Donald Trump, no matter what he says or does. It’s too good for business.

Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.

It’s a weak, cowardly argument to infer that if Twitter doesn’t provide a platform for Trump, then someone else will. This is absolutely about their growth, absolutely about the fact they make software with shareholders.

Source: Twitter blog

Image via CNN

An interesting interview with Fred Turner, former journalist, Stanford professor, and someone who spends a lot of time studying the technology and culture of Silicon Valley.

Turner likens tech companies who try to do away with hierarchy to 1960s communes:

When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.

It's an interesting viewpoint, and one which chimes with works such as The Tyranny of Structurelessness. I still think less hierarchy is a good thing. But then I would say that, because I'm a white, privileged western man getting ever-closer to middle-age...

Source: Logic magazine

I’m a big fan of Cathy Davidson, and look forward to reading her new book. In this article, she explains that we’ve unleashed an ‘educational monster’ by forcing students to be memorisers rather than content creators:

Increasingly, we are shrinking educational opportunities for our youth worldwide, robbing them of the creativity of the arts, the critical thinking of the humanities and social sciences, and reducing all knowledge to test scores, despite repeated workforce studies stressing the importance of deep learning. The trend is to use standardised tests as the entrance to university and therefore to a middle-class future, even though we have ample research, extending back to the Hermann Ebbinghaus memory experiments of the 1880s, about the evanescence of knowledge crammed for the purpose of test-taking.

As ever with Cathy's writing, it's a good and well-researched read. I'm not sure about framing it in terms of 'outcomes-based' education, however, as judging people by outcomes in the workplace is generally seen as a good thing. Perhaps emphasise that the journey is more important than the destination? That's why granular badges within a portfolio are a great alternative to letter grades and high-stakes testing.

Source: The Guardian

The Mozilla Foundation may have shut down pretty much all of its learning programmes, but it’s still doing interesting stuff around Open Leadership. Chad Sansing writes:

We think of Open Leadership as a set of principles, practices, and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. For example, Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox, was developed with an open code base with community contribution and support.

They're using the Web Literacy Map (work I led during my time with Mozilla) as a reference point. It's early days, but here's what they've got so far:

There’s also a white paper which they say will be updated in February 2018. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. Along with great work being done at opensource.com’s community around The Open Organization it’s a great time to be a open leader!

Source: Read, Write, Participate

England’s Children’s Commissioner has released a report entitled ‘Life in Likes’ which has gathered lots of attention in my networks. This, despite the fact that during the research they only talked to only 32 children. I used to teach over 250 kids a week! 32 is a class size, not a representative sample.

This article includes quotations from parents, such as this one:

Parent Trevor said his 12-year-old twin daughters had moved schools as a result of the pressure from social media, but admits they "can't walk away" from it.

He told BBC Radio 5 live: “I can’t say to them, ‘You can’t use that,’ when I use it."

Yes you can. My kids see me drink alcohol but it doesn’t mean I let them have it. My son has a smartphone with an app lock on the Google Play store so he can’t install apps without my permission.

The solution to this stuff does involve basic digital skills, but mainly what’s lacking here are parenting skills, I think.

Source: BBC News

I missed this at the end of last year, perhaps because I live in a small town in the north of England rather than a bustling metropolis:

Welcome to the world of ‘dark kitchens’ – fully-equipped commercial kitchens like you’d find attached to a restaurant, except with no restaurant or even a takeaway counter. Also known as virtual kitchens, they are dedicated solely to meeting the ever-growing hunger for online delivery services, facilitated by the likes of third party delivery apps.

These kitchens are anything but dark at peak times such as Friday or Saturday night, as noodles, pizza, curries and much more exotic—and increasingly, healthy—fare is sizzled up on a made-to-order basis while drivers for food delivery platforms such as Just Eat, Deliveroo, Seamless, and Uber Eats wait outside.

Incredible and obvious at the same time.

Source: The Times

From a shocking photojournalism story:

With imported soft drinks costing the same or less than bottled water, in a country where tap water is not safe to drink, the poorest people are most likely to develop diabetes. Mexico’s health ministry said in 2016 that 72% of adults were overweight or obese. But the same people are prone to malnutrition thanks to a diet high in sugar and saturated fats and low in fibre

Source: The Guardian

The rest of this month’s WIRED magazine is full of its usual hubris, but the section on ‘fixing the internet’ is actually pretty good. I particularly like Jaron Lanier’s framing of the problem we’ve got with advertising supporting the online economy:

Something has gone very wrong: it's the business model. And specifically, it's what is called advertising. We call it advertising, but that name in itself is misleading. It is really statistical behaviour-modification of the population in a stealthy way. Unlike [traditional] advertising, which works via persuasion, this business model depends on manipulating people's attention and their perceptions of choice. Every single penny Facebook makes is from doing that and 90 per cent of what Google makes is from doing that. (Only a small minority of the money that Apple, Microsoft and Amazon makes is from doing that, so this should not be taken as a complete indictment of big tech.)

Source: WIRED

The Opera web browser has joined Brave in allowing users to turn on ‘cryptojacking’ protection:

Bitcoins are really hot right now, but did you know that they might actually be making your computer hotter? Your CPU suddenly working at 100 percent capacity, the fan is going crazy for seemingly no reason and your battery quickly depleting might all be signs that someone is using your computer to mine for cryptocurrency.

For a very short period of time around five years ago I 'cryptojacked' visitors to my blog using JavaScript. Back then, Bitcoin was worth so little, and the slowdown for visitors was so great, that I soon turned it off.

Given the recent explosive rise in Bitcoin’s value, however, it would seem that cryptojacking is yet another thing to guard against online…

Source: Opera blog

Fred Wilson is author of the incredibly popular blog AVC. He prefaces his first post of the year in the following way:

This is a post that I am struggling to write. I really have no idea what is going to happen in 2018.

He does, however, go on to answer ten questions, the most interesting of which are those he answers in the affirmative:

• Will the tech backlash that I wrote about yesterday continue to escalate? Yes.
• Will we see more gender and racial diversity in tech? Yes.
• Will Trump be President at the end of 2018. Yes.

I picked up a copy of WIRED magazine at the airport yesterday for the flight home. (I used to subscribe, but it annoyed me too much.) It is useful, though, for taking the temperature of the tech sector. Given there were sections on re-distributing the Internet, the backlash against the big four tech companies, and diversity in tech, I think they're likely to be amongst the big trends for the (ever-widening) tech sector 2018.

Source: AVC