Stratechery

27 August 2022

Lessin’s five steps and the coming AI apocalypse

I’m not really on any of the big centralised social networks any more, but I’m interested in the effect they have on society. Apparently there have been calls recently complaining about, and resisting, changes that Instagram has made.

In this post, Ben Thompson cites Sam Lessin, a former Facebook exec, who suggests we’re at step four of a five-step process.

The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era

Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine

Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends

Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians

Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’

There’s a bit in this post which I think is a pretty deep insight about human behaviour, identity, and the story we like to tell ourselves. Again, it’s Thompson quoting Lessin:

I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was recommending to them…a very crass but probably pretty hilarious video. Their indignant response [was that] “the ranking must be broken.” Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn’t broken. He probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him feel bad. He doesn’t want to see himself as the type of person that clicks on things like that, even if he would enjoy it.

So TikTok and other platforms reducing the need for human interaction to deliver ‘engaging’ content have the capacity to fundamentally change the way we think about the world.

In another, related, post Charles Arthur scaremongers about how AI-created content will overwhelm us:

I suspect in the future there will be a premium on good, human-generated content and response, but that huge and growing amounts of the content that people watch and look at and read on content networks (“social networks” will become outdated) will be generated automatically, and the humans will be more and more happy about it.

In its way, it sounds like the society in Fahrenheit 451 (that’s 233ºC for Europeans) though without the book burning. There’s no need: why read a book when there’s something fascinating you can watch instead?

Quite what effect this has on social warming is unclear. Possibly it accelerates polarisation, but rather like the Facebook Blenderbot, people are just segmented into their own world, and not shown things that will disturb them. Or, perhaps, they’re shown just enough to annoy them and engage them again if their attention seems to be flagging. After all, if you can generate unlimited content, you can do what you want. And as we know, what the companies who do this want is your attention, all the time.

As ever, I don’t think we’re ready for this. Not even close.

Sources: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends | Stratechery by Ben Thompson and The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us | Social Warming by Charles Arthur

10 July 2020

Friday fadings

I’m putting this together quickly before heading off to the Lake District camping with my son for a couple of nights. I’m pretty close to burnout with all of the things that have happened recently, so need some time on top of mountains and under the stars 🏕️

The Slack Social Network

Slack Connect is about more than chat: not only can you have multiple companies in one channel, you can also manage the flow of data between different organizations; to put it another way, while Microsoft is busy building an operating system in the cloud, Slack has decided to build the enterprise social network. Or, to put it in visual terms, Microsoft is a vertical company, and Slack has gone fully horizontal.
Ben Thompson (Stratechery)

The difference between consulting full-time now versus when I last did it in 2017 is that everyone adds you to their Slack workspace. This is simultaneously fantastic and terrible. What’s being described here is more on the ‘Work OS’ stuff I shared in last week’s link roundup.

See also Stephen Downes’ commentary on mini-apps that perform particular functions inside other apps.

Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked

Advertising funded businesses are aware that the minority of visitors want to give consent.
They are simply riding the ad train and milking the cash cow for as long as they can get away with before GDPR gets enforced and they either shut down, adapt to a more sustainable business model or explore even more privacy invasive practices.
And the alternative to the advertising-funded web? Charge for services. And have your premium subscribers fund the free plans.
Marko Saric

This is interesting, and backs up the findings in this journal article about the ‘dark patterns’ prevalent around GDPR consent on the web. The author of this post found that only 48% of people clicked on the banner and, as the title states, only 9% of those gave permission to be tracked.

Oak National Academy: lockdown saviour or DfE tool?

There are some who are alarmed by the nature of the creature that the DfE has helped bring to life, seeing Oak as an enterprise established by a narrow strata of figures from DfE-favoured multi-academy trusts; and as a potential vehicle for the department to promote a “traditionalist” agenda in teaching, or even create the subject matter of a government-approved curriculum.
John Morgan (TES)

I welcome this critical article in the TES of Oak National Academy. My two children find the lessons ‘cringey’, not every subject is covered, and the more you look into it, the more it seems like a front for a pedagogical coup.

The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal

Journal entries should provide not only a record of what happened but how we reacted emotionally; writing it down brings a certain clarity that puts things in perspective. In other cases, it’s a form of mental rehearsal to prepare for particularly sensitive issues where there’s no one to talk with but yourself. Journals can also be the best way to think through big-bet decisions and test one’s logic.
Dan Ciampa (Harvard Business Review

When I turned 18, I decided to keep a diary of my adult life. After about a decade, that had become a sporadic record of times when things weren’t going so well. Now, 21 years later, I merely keep my #HashtagADay journal up-to-date.

But writing things down is really useful, as is having someone to talk to with whom you don’t have an emotion-based relationship. After nine sessions of CBT, I wish I’d had someone like my therapist to talk to at a much younger age. Not because I’m ‘broken’ but because I’m human.

Top 10 books about tumultuous times

There’s nothing like a crisis of survival to show people’s true natures. Though I’ve written a good deal about tumultuous times, both fiction (English Passengers) and non-fiction (Rome: a History in Seven Sackings), I can’t say I’m too interested in the tumult itself. I’m more interested in the decisions people make during such crises – how they ride the wave.
Matthew Kneale (THe GUardian)

I don’t think I’d heard of any of these books before reading this article! That being said, I’ve just joined Verso’s new Book Club so my backlog just got a lot longer…

Full Employment

Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in.
No one’s really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there.
Cory Doctorow (Locus Online)

I’ve quoted the end of this fantastic article, but you should read the whole thing. Doctorow, in his own inimitable way, absolutely eviscerates the prediction that a ‘General Artificial Intelligence’ will destroy most jobs.

Header image by Patrick Hendry

10 January 2020

Friday flurries

It’s been a busy week, but I’ve still found time to unearth these gems…

The Dark Psychology of Social Networks (The Atlantic) — “The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase moral grandstanding to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. Like a succession of orators speaking to a skeptical audience, each person strives to outdo previous speakers, leading to some common patterns. Grandstanders tend to “trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays.” Nuance and truth are casualties in this competition to gain the approval of the audience. Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents—and sometimes even their friends—for the potential to evoke public outrage. Context collapses. The speaker’s intent is ignored.”
Live Your Best Life—On and Off Your Phone—in 2020 (WIRED) — “It’s your devices versus your best life. Just in time for a new decade, though, several fresh books offer a more measured approach to living in the age of technology. These are not self-help books, or even books that confront our relationship with technology head-on. Instead, they examine the realities of a tech-saturated world and offer a few simple ideas for rewriting bad habits, reviewing the devices we actually need, and relearning how to listen amid all the noise.”
People Who Are Obsessed With Success and Prestige (Bennett Notes) — “What does it look like to be obsessed with success and prestige? It probably looks a lot like me at the moment. A guy who starts many endeavors and side projects just because he wants to be known as the creator of something. This a guy who wants to build another social app, not because he has an unique problem that’s unaddressed, but because he wants to be the cool tech entrepreneur who everyone admires and envies. This is a guy who probably doesn’t care for much of what he does, but continues to do so for the eventual social validation of society and his peers.”
The Lesson to Unlearn (Paul Graham) — “Merely talking explicitly about this phenomenon is likely to make things better, because much of its power comes from the fact that we take it for granted. After you’ve noticed it, it seems the elephant in the room, but it’s a pretty well camouflaged elephant. The phenomenon is so old, and so pervasive. And it’s simply the result of neglect. No one meant things to be this way. This is just what happens when you combine learning with grades, competition, and the naive assumption of unhackability.”
The End of the Beginning (Stratechery) — “[In consumer-focused startups] few companies are pure “tech” companies seeking to disrupt the dominant cloud and mobile players; rather, they take their presence as an assumption, and seek to transform society in ways that were previously impossible when computing was a destination, not a given. That is exactly what happened with the automobile: its existence stopped being interesting in its own right, while the implications of its existence changed everything.”
Populism Is Morphing in Insidious Ways (The Atlantic) — “If the 2010s were the years in which predominantly far-right, populist parties permeated the political mainstream, then the 2020s will be when voters “are going to see the consequences of that,” Daphne Halikiopoulou, an associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Reading, in England, told me.”
It’s the network, stupid: Study offers fresh insight into why we’re so divided (Ars Technica) — “There is no easy answer when it comes to implementing structural changes that encourage diversity, but today’s extreme polarization need not become a permanent characteristic of our cultural landscape. “I think we need to adopt new skills as we are transitioning into a more complex, more globalized, and more interconnected world, where each of us can affect far-away parts of the world with our actions,” said Galesic.”
Memorizing Lists of Cognitive Biases Won’t Help (Hapgood) — “But if you want to change your own behavior, memorizing long lists of biases isn’t going to help you. If anything it’s likely to just become another weapon in your motivated reasoning arsenal. You can literally read the list of biases to see why reading the list won’t work.”
How to get more done by doing less (Fast Company) — “Sometimes, the secret to doing more isn’t optimizing every minute, but finding the things you can cull from your schedule. That way, you not only reduce the time you spend on non-essential tasks, but you can also find more time for yourself.”

Image via xkcd

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