It’s hard not to agree with this. Things may play out a little different in the EU, but in the USA and UK I can foresee the middle classes despairing.
Legacy businesses will have to rely on retail and hourly support staff to be able to reduce management head count as a means of freeing up money for implementing automation. In order to do that, they will need to implement AI management tools; chat bots, scheduling, negotiating, training, data collection, diagnostic analysis, etc., before hand.
Otherwise, they will be left to rely on an overly bureaucratic and entrenched middle management layer to do so and that solution is likely to come from outsourcing or consultants. All the while, the retail environment deteriorates as workers are tasked to replace themselves without any additional benefits; service declines, implementation falters, costs go up, more consulting required.
Union formation across the retail landscape will force corporations to reduce management head count and implement AI management solutions which focus on labor relations. The once fungible and disposable retail worker will be transformed into a highly sought after professional who will be relied upon specifically for automation implementation.
I’ll not name the employer, and this wasn’t recent, but I’ve been ‘quietly fired’ from a job before. I never really knew why, other than a conflict of personalities, but there was no particular need for pursuing that path (instead of having a grown-up conversation) and it definitely had an impact on my mental health.
I think part of the reason this happens is because a lot of organisations have extremely poor HR functions and managers without much training. As a result, they muddle through, avoiding conflict, and causing more problems as a result.
There may not always be a good fit between jobs and the workers hired to do them. In these cases, companies and bosses may decide they want the worker to depart. Some may go through formal channels to show employees the door, but others may do what Eliza’s boss did – behave in such a way that the employee chooses to walk away. Methods may vary; bosses may marginalise workers, make their lives difficult or even set them up to fail. This can take place over weeks, but also months and years. Either way, the objective is the same: to show the worker they don’t have a future with the company and encourage them to leave.
In overt cases, this is known as ‘constructive dismissal’: when an employee is forced to leave because the employer created a hostile work environment. The more subtle phenomenon of nudging employees slowly but surely out of the door has recently been dubbed ‘quiet firing’ (the apparent flipside to ‘quiet quitting’, where employees do their job, but no more). Rather than lay off workers, employers choose to be indirect and avoid conflict. But in doing so, they often unintentionally create even greater harm.
[…]
An employee subtly nudged out the door isn’t without legal recourse, either. “If you were to look at each individual aspect of quiet firing, there’s likely nothing serious enough to prove an employer breach of contract,” says Horne. “However, there’s the last-straw doctrine: one final act by the employer which, when added together with past behaviours, can be asserted as constructive dismissal by the employee.”
More immediate though, is the mental-health cost to the worker deemed to be expendable by the employer – but who is never directly informed. “The psychological toll of quiet firing creates a sense of rejection and of being an outcast from their work group. That can have a huge negative impact on a person’s wellbeing,” says Kayes.
This is written in typical bombastic Jacobin style, and I’ve yet to read Vitalik Buterin’s book, but I have to say I can’t disagree with the conclusion: there is no leftist case for crypto.
Perhaps there was in the beginning? But now it’s easy to see where it’s headed. And it’s not in any way a socialist enterprise.
Their intentions aside, let’s try asking with seriousness: Is there a leftist case for crypto? Helpfully, Ethereum cofounder Buterin has published a book, 'Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains', in which he outlines how cryptocurrencies represent a “new method of social incentivization” that will offer a new democratic “way to pool together our money and support public projects and activities that help create the society we want to see.”
The book is helpful, but not exactly in the way Buterin thinks. It reveals how Buterin’s case is wholly, shockingly bereft of a political vision to achieve such a society, let alone a vision rooted in the most basic political and moral principles of the Left. If 'Proof of Stake' is any indication of the existing rhetoric and principles from which one could construct a leftist case for crypto, then no leftist case for crypto can be made.
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What emerges in 'Proof of Stake'... is not a clearer leftist case for crypto but a clearer sense of Buterin’s essayistic style. The instant a reader wants to hear more about this oft-mentioned equitable world of public goods that crypto can bring us, Buterin scampers back into technical discussions.
[…]
As a writer, Buterin is the perfect embodiment of crypto as we’ve come to know it: he strays from his technical world long enough to look past the convoluted discourse and glimpse the need for a political framework, but then, whether by fright or disinterest, he returns to his comfort zone. He writes with admirable passion and unusual clarity about these technical issues that his technology is confronting, but the result doesn’t add up to anything resembling a leftist case for crypto — most likely because there isn’t one.
If you’re digging a hole or otherwise doing manual work, it’s obvious when you’re working and when you’re not. The same is true, to a great extent, when teaching (my former occupation).
Doing what I do now, which is broadly under the banner of ‘knowledge work’, it can be difficult for others to see the difference between when I’m working and when I’m not. This is one of the reasons that working from home is so liberating.
The funny thing is, sitting alone thinking doesn’t “look” like work. Even more so if it’s away from your computer.
[…]
I recently had a conversation with a long-time colleague, someone I know and respect. I found it interesting that even he, who has worked in software since the 90’s, still felt odd when he wasn’t at his computer “working”. After decades of experience, he knew and understood that the most meaningful conceptual progress he made on problems was always away from his computer: on a run, in the shower, laying in bed at night. That’s where the insight came. And yet, even after all these years, he still felt a strange obligation to be at his computer because that’s too often our the metal image of “working”.
It’s almost a year now that I finally deactivated my Twitter account with no intention of going back to it. Like Ben Werdmuller in this article, I had a yearly ‘detox’ from the service. Coming back from it became harder and harder.
Twitter from 2007 to about 2011 (coincidentally the birth years of my children!) was amazing. It was definitely helpful in terms of my career, and I’m still in touch with people who I got to know via Twitter from that period.
But I don’t need it any more. I use various Fediverse accounts and LinkedIn to keep in touch with people personally and professionally. I also don’t share as much of my life as I used to online, partly because the world has changed and partly because therapy showed me it was all part of the mask I’m wearing.
So yes, let’s pour one out for Twitter, which if Musk’s acquisition goes ahead, is going to be a empty husk of what it was formerly. Life moves on.
For a few years, it was tradition that I’d go offline for the year at around Thanksgiving, to give myself some time to recover from the cognitive load of all those notifications. I don’t think the constant dopamine rush is in any way good for you, but the site’s function as a de facto town square has also helped me learn and grow. It’s a health hazard and an information firehose; a community and an attack vector for democracy. More than even Facebook, I think it’s defined the internet’s role in democratic society during the 21st century.
[…]
As big tech silos diminish in stature, the all-in-one town squares we’ve enjoyed on the internet are going to start to fade from view. In some ways, it’s akin to the decline of the broadcast television networks: whereas there used to be a handful of channels that entire nations tuned into together, we now enjoy content that’s fragmented over hundreds. The same will be true of our community hangouts and conversations. In the same way that broadcast television didn’t really capture the needs of the breadth of its audience but instead enjoyed its popularity because that’s what was there at the time, we’ll find that fragmented communities better fit the needs of the breadth of diverse society. It’s a natural evolution.
It’s also one that demands better community platforms. We’re still torn between 1994-era websites, 1996-era Internet forums, and 2002-era social networks, with some video sharing platforms in-between. We could use more innovation in this space: better spaces for different kinds of conversations (and particularly asynchronous ones), better applications of distributed identities, better ways to follow conversations across all the places we’re having them. This is a time for new ideas and experimentation.
Sure, it’s an advert for beer, but it’s also a brilliant example of how you can bring people together IRL to get to know one another despite seemingly-intractable differences.
Jon Dron makes a good point here that we need to put the humanity back into education, otherwise we’re going to have AI everywhere and a completely broken system.
I thought it would be fun, in an ironic kind of way, to use an AI art generator to illustrate this post…
To a significant extent, we already have artificial students, and artificial teachers teaching them. How ridiculous is that? How broken is the system that not only allows it but actively promotes it?
[…]
This is a wake-up call. Soon, if not already, most of the training data for the AIs will be generated by AIs. Unchecked, the result is going to be a set of ever-worse copies of copies, that become what the next generation consumes and learns from, in a vicious spiral that leaves us at best stagnant, at worst something akin to the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine. If we don’t want this to happen then it is time for educators to reclaim, to celebrate, and (perhaps a little) to reinvent our humanity. We need, more and more, to think of education as a process of learning to be, not of learning to do, except insofar as the doing contributes to our being. It’s about people, learning to be people, in the presence of and through interaction with other people. It’s about creativity, compassion, and meaning, not the achievement of outcomes a machine could replicate with ease. I think it should always have been this way.
Happy as I am with my Garmin Venu 2s, if I didn’t need to also buy an iPhone to use one, I probably already would have bought an Apple Watch Ultra. Despite my skinny wrists, my recent health scare means that the cellular capability and ECG combined with a more-than-24-hour battery life would seal the deal.
So I was interested in this review by someone who took the Ultra up into the Scottish Highlands. It turns out he loved it.
I don’t think you can properly test a device like this without taking it out into the field. So the day my Ultra arrived, I booked myself onto a sleeper train up to the Scottish Highlands for a three day hiking trip to really see how it performed. I ended up hiking just over 61 miles.
The standard Apple Watches are incredibly capable devices, that I’ve used to great utility on countless hiking trips, but using them in that context always felt a bit like I was pushing the boundary of what it was intended for or capable of. Whereas the Ultra is very much designed for the backcountry context. It is more rugged, more long lasting and much easier to read…all while still being 100% an Apple Watch and not compromising any of the features that make a standard Apple Watch so useful.
A typically thought-provoking piece by L. M. Sacasas which, ironically, I’ve got plenty of time to read, process, and react to after getting up ridiculously early this morning!
It’s interesting to read this from a UK context, after an enforced mourning period after the death of the Queen. This piece definitely speaks into that context, about the “range of legible emotions” being “constricted”. After all, you weren’t even allowed to hold up a blank sheet of paper in public.
The rhythms of digital media rush me on from crisis to crisis, from outrage to outrage. Moreover, in rapid succession the same feed brings to me the tragic and the comic as well as the trivial and the consequential. So, it’s not just that I do not have the time or space to think deeply. I also do not have the time or space to feel deeply. I skim the surface of each emotional experience, but rarely can I plumb its depths or sound out its meaning. Consequently, I lose something of the richness of the emotions and miss out on their appropriate consolations. I feel enough to be overwhelmed and depleted, but I cannot inhabit an emotional experience long enough to see it through to its natural fulfillment with whatever growth of character or richness of experience that might entail.
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The policing of other’s emotional expressions is one sign that the discourse is colonizing our emotional life. Such policing tends to generate an artificiality of (usually negative or critical) emotional expression, and conditions us to avoid certain (usually positive or earnest) emotional expressions. Under these conditions, emotional life is stunted. The range of legible emotions is constricted. Complex or subtle emotional experiences are overwhelmed by the demand for intense and uncomplicated emotional expressions.
They say that technical innovation often comes from the porn industry, but the same is true of new forms of censorship.
For those who don’t know or remember, Tumblr used to have a policy around porn that was literally “Go nuts, show nuts. Whatever.” That was memorable and hilarious, and for many people, Tumblr both hosted and helped with the discovery of a unique type of adult content.
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[N]o modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible….
[…]
If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.
I think the comment at the end of this article about people being wary of Stadia because Google tends to shut down services is spot-on. I really liked Stadia, and bought five controllers which I either used within our family or gifted.
During the pandemic, I completed Sniper Elite 4 and all of the DLCs via Stadia. I bought FIFA 22 and Cyberpunk 2077 at full-price as I crossed my fingers behind my back hoping the service would survive.
Ultimately, being refunded for hardware purchases and games I bought is a win-win situation for me. I cancelled my Stadia Pro account earlier this year, dabbling first with Xbox Game Cloud via a Razer Kishi, then upgrading my PlayStation Plus account on the PS5, and more recently investing in a Steam Deck.
The good news is that the true Armageddon situation for Stadia customers is not happening. Google is issuing refunds, which will save dedicated Stadia players from potentially losing hundreds of dollars in unplayable games. The post says: "We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store." That notably excludes payments to the "Stadia Pro" subscription service, and you won't get hardware refunds from non-Google Store purchases, but that's a pretty good deal. Existing Pro users will be able to play, free of charge, from now until the shutdown date. The controllers are still useful as wired USB controllers, and a campaign is already starting to get Google to unlock the Bluetooth connection.
[…]
Google Stadia never lived up to its initial promise. The service, which ran a game in the cloud and sent each individual frame of video down to your computer or phone, was pitched as a gaming platform that would benefit from Google’s worldwide scale and streaming expertise. While it was a trailblazing service, competitors quickly popped up with better scale, better hardware, better relationships with developers, and better games. The service didn’t take off immediately and reportedly undershot Google’s estimates by “hundreds of thousands” of users. Google then quickly defunded the division, involving the high-profile closure of its in-house development studio before it could make a single game.
[…]
Google’s damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.
As a former teacher, I almost cried reading this. Can someone with some authority and leadership stand up and say not only was Brexit a terrible idea, but the current government’s fiscal “strategy” will absolutely break this country?
Children are so hungry that they are eating rubbers or hiding in the playground because they can’t afford lunch, according to reports from headteachers across England.
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One school in Lewisham, south-east London, told the charity about a child who was “pretending to eat out of an empty lunchbox” because they did not qualify for free school meals and did not want their friends to know there was no food at home.
Community food aid groups also told the Observer this week that they are struggling to cope with new demand from families unable to feed their children. “We are hearing about kids who are so hungry they are eating rubbers in school,” said Naomi Duncan, chief executive of Chefs in Schools. “Kids are coming in having not eaten anything since lunch the day before. The government has to do something.”
I turn 42 later this year, and this would explain a lot. Not in terms of me being unable to be super-efficient and productive, but just in terms of seeing connections everywhere.
In a systematic review recently published in the journal Psychophysiology, researchers from Monash University in Australia swept through the scientific literature, seeking to summarize how the connectivity of the human brain changes over our lifetimes. The gathered evidence suggests that in the fifth decade of life (that is, after a person turns 40), the brain starts to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated and connected over the ensuing decades, with accompanying effects on cognition.
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Early on, in our teenage and young adult years, the brain seems to have numerous, partitioned networks with high levels of inner connectivity, reflecting the ability for specialized processing to occur. That makes sense, as this is the time when we are learning how to play sports, speak languages, and develop talents. Around our mid-40s, however, that starts to change. Instead, the brain begins becoming less connected within those separate networks and more connected globally across networks. By the time we reach our 80s, the brain tends to be less regionally specialized and instead broadly connected and integrated.
[…]
“During the early years of life, there is a rapid organization of functional brain networks. A further refinement of the functional networks then takes place until around the third and fourth decade of life. A multi-faceted interplay of potentially harmful and compensatory changes can follow in aging,” the reviewers concluded.
I finally caved and bought a Steam Deck this week. I’ve loads of Steam games that I’ve collected over the years and some of them are amazing on the Deck. GRID motorsport, for example, as well as Star Wars Squadrons.
This list is a reminder to myself to explore some other, different kinds of games that I don’t usually play.
One of the neat things about the Steam Deck is that even before you’ve wrenched the handheld PC from its cardboard box, you’ll probably already own a bunch of games for it, as it’s designed to be naturally compatible with as much of the existing Steam catalogue as possible. Some games are more Deck-ready than others, however, so if you’re a newly minted owner looking for where to start, perhaps this list of the 30 best Steam Deck games might be of service?
A timely reminder via Emma Cragg’s latest newsletter that sharing our own perspective is enough. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of the author’s daughter’s curl at the bottom of the newsletter as a reminder than not everything has to be ‘the best’ to have value.
I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent questioning if anything I have to say is worthy of being shared — questioning my own creativity, my own ideas, my own experiences put into words, my own writing and art. I’ve questioned if it matters at all since there are a million other people doing the same thing. I’ve questioned if it’s just adding more noise and consumption in a world over-stuffed with exactly that. I’ve questioned if it should even be worked on if it isn’t going to be the best. I’ve questioned my own enoughness in relation to what I create, what I put into the world, what I choose to say out loud and how I say it. I’ve questioned this newsletter, these words, this exact moment.
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Yet my questioning of my work bypasses an important truth: no one else can do my work because no one else is me. And no one else can do your work because no one else is you. When I write, I write with my entire being: my lived experience and history, my genes and blood, my vision and longing, my grief and hope, my path and where I come from, my vantage point and opinion, my heart and soul — things only I have that cannot be replicated. Similarly, only you can do the work you do — whether it’s parenting or creating art, working on cars or computers, gardening or running, performing or teaching — only you can do what you do in the exact way you do it.
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We easily forget that what we create is part of a web — part of something bigger — part of a huge tapestry of others sharing themselves and their work in the ways only they can, right alongside us. And when we choose to show up for our work, we add to the web in a way that makes life more full, more rich, more beautiful. We place our piece in the tapestry in a way only we can, which enhances the whole of it. We add our voice to a collective choir who may all be saying the same thing, but how much sweeter is it when there’s a whole room of it, a whole stadium, a whole world?
This website, riskyby.design, is a project of the 5Rights Foundation. It does a good job of talking about the benefits and drawbacks of anonymity in a way that isn’t patronising.
Online anonymity can take many forms, from pseudonyms that conceal “real” identities to private browsers or VPNs that allow users to be “untraceable.” There are also services designed specifically to grant users anonymity, known as “anonymous apps”.
Often conflated with privacy, true anonymity - the total absence of personally identifying information - is difficult to achieve in a digital environment where traces of ourselves are left every time we engage with a service. Anonymity is best considered on a continuum, ranging “from the totally anonymous to the thoroughly named”.
People have lots of reasons for being anonymous online. While anonymity affords a degree of protection to people like journalists, whistle-blowers and marginalised users, the lack of traceability that some types of anonymity offer may prevent people from being held accountable for their actions.
Granular permissions between private and public spaces is a hard problem to solve, as this blog post shows.
A few years ago, Apple acquired Color Labs, who were trying to solve the ‘share with contacts based on an ‘elastic social graph’. These days, I imagine this kind of problem being solved by Bonfire.
I wanted to share the pics and videos with the people I know, so they too can see (if they like) the awesome event that I just went to.
But I had a problem that was recurring for a while, that is how to share different photos with the different connections that I have. There are photos that I can share publicly, and there are photos that I don’t want some people to see, such as my students, acquaintances, and work-related colleagues,
I think this is a great post for people who realise that there might be something wrong with the hierarchy-by-default way we run organisations and society. It’s hard not to come away from it feeling a little liberated.
As someone who has spent the last few years in a co-op with consent-based decision-making and a flat structure, however, I don’t buy the ‘hierarchy is here to stay’ nihilism. Instead, although it’s not what we’ve been brought up to be used to, something like sociocratic circles can scale infinitely!
Being an adult means not measuring yourself entirely on other people’s definition of success. Personal growth might come in the guise of a big promotion, but it also might look like a new job, a different role, a swing to management or back, becoming well-known as a subject matter expert, mentoring others, running an affinity group, picking up new skill sets, starting a company, trying your hand at consulting, speaking at conferences, taking a sabbatical, having a family, working part time, etc. No one gets to define that but you.
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Why do people climb the ladder? “Because it’s there.” And when they don’t have any other animating goals, the ladder fills a vacuum.
But if you never make the leap from externally-motivated to intrinsically-motivated, this will eventually becomes a serious risk factor for your career. Without an inner compass (and a renewable source of joy), you will struggle to locate and connect with the work that gives your life meaning. You will risk burnout, apathy and a serious lack of fucks given..
[I]f everything is a priority, nothing is priority. As you’ve no doubt found from your own experience, the “we can have it all” mindset fails frequently as we repeatedly come up short trying to be the best at everything.A better approach is to make trade-offs explicit, by choosing one thing over another thing. Done well, it will result in focus, clarity, alignment, better decision-making, and competitive edge. We want to share with you a practical method that we often use with our clients: the even over statement.
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An even over statement is a phrase containing two positive things, where the former is prioritized over the latter.
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Here are a few examples:
Product tradeoffs
Exclusive product line even over mass market adoption
Amazing customer service even over new product features
Mobile experience even over desktop experience
Revenue growth even over user growth
Culture tradeoffs
Collaboration even over focus
Progress even over perfection
Honest feedback even over harmony
Impact even over following a plan
Quality even over volume
Hiring team players even over deep experts
Some good points in this photo essay, including photography leading to greater compassion as well as political influence.
Photographs were more than just pictures. While the inventors never intended more than to capture an image, the medium turned into a social force with far-reaching effects.
