“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Full blog post by Twitter.
“Come on, everyone! Let’s go to Parler!”
“And if Apple pulls our app, we’ve always got Android.”
Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (Subscription required. Here’s John Gruber’s post):
“In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.
Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.
Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp , sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.
None of those apps provided users any apparent way to stop that information from being sent to Facebook.”
So I’m thinking about apps that I use: TextGrabber, Scanner Pro et al. Are they sending my shit to Facebook (even though I don’t have an account?). Apple needs to stop this shit or at the ver least tell us which apps are doing this so we can delete them.
“Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It’s the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world.” (Amazon)
I’ve been creeping in this direction for a while. Never on FB; deleted my Twitter account back in 2016; and said goodbye to Google+ last year. But my world is still noisier than I’d like and I got some good ideas from this book. Here’s a few excerpts:
“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.”
“Checking your “likes” is the new smoking.” — Bill Maher
“(Smart phones are) slot machines in our pockets.”
“What’s the single biggest factor shaping our lives today?” (Our screens)
“We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.”
“The iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind.”
“You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.”
“A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.”
“Assuming that you use Facebook, list the most important things it provides you—the particular activities that you would really miss if you were forced to stop using the service altogether. Now imagine that Facebook started charging you by the minute. How much time would you really need to spend in the typical week to keep up with your list of important Facebook activities?”
Excerpts from Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee.
Imagine a stew of unregulated capitalism, addictive technology, and authoritarian values, combined with Silicon Valley’s relentlessness and hubris, unleashed on billions of unsuspecting users.
The most likely case is that the technology and business model of Facebook and others will continue to undermine democracy, public health, privacy, and innovation until a countervailing power, in the form of government intervention or user protest, forces change.
Surveillance, the sharing of user data, and behavioral modification are the foundation of Facebook’s success.
When users are riled up, they consume and share more content. Dispassionate users have relatively little value to Facebook.
Facebook is the fourth most valuable company in America, despite being only fifteen years old, and its value stems from its mastery of surveillance and behavioral modification.
It turns out that connecting 2.2 billion people on a single network does not naturally produce happiness for all. It puts pressure on users, first to present a desirable image, then to command attention in the form of Likes or shares from others. In such an environment, the loudest voices dominate, which can be intimidating. As a result, we follow the human instinct to organize ourselves into clusters or tribes.
The competition for attention across the media and technology spectrum rewards the worst social behavior. Extreme views attract more attention, so platforms recommend them.
Research suggests that people who accept one conspiracy theory have a high likelihood of accepting a second one.
Belonging is stronger than facts.
The Russians might have invented a new kind of warfare, one perfectly suited to a fading economic power looking to regain superpower status.
Technology tends to reflect the values of the people who create them.
When a company grows from nothing to 2.2 billion active users and forty billion dollars in revenues in only fourteen years, you can be sure of three things: First, the original idea was brilliant. Second, execution of the business plan had to be nearly flawless. And third, at some point along the way, the people who manage the company will lose perspective. If everything your company touches turns into gold for years on end, your executives will start to believe the good things people say about them. They will view their mission as exalted. They will reject criticism. They will ask, “If the critics are so smart, why aren’t they so successful and rich as we are?”
On Facebook, information and disinformation look the same; the only difference is that disinformation generates more revenue, so it gets much better treatment.
Huge amounts of data are available. Campaigns can buy a list of two hundred million voting-age Americans with fifteen hundred data points per person from a legitimate data broker for seventy-five thousand dollars.
Where Orwell worried about the burning of books, Huxley argued that the greater risk would be citizen no longer wanting to read.
Facebook is a threat to democracy.
“(Facebook) has created an entirely new category of relationship — the vestigial friendship. It’s the one you’ve evolved out of, the one that would normally have faded out of your life, but which, thanks to Facebook, is instead still hanging around.”
“Having many Facebook friends, then, is kind of like having a big old encyclopedia. Most of the time it’s just gathering dust on a shelf but you keep it around anyway, because one day you might need it.”
Excerpts from Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff.
There’s a reason for our current predicament: an anti-human agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media.
Thinking, feeling, connected people undermine the institutions that would control them. […] Our institutions and technologies aren’t designed to extend our human nature, but to mitigate and repress it.
It doesn’t take much to tilt a healthy social landscape toward an individualist or repressive one. A scarcity of resources, a hostile neighboring tribe, a warlord looking for power, and elite seeking to maintain its authority, or a corporation pursuing a monopoly all foster antisocial environments and behaviors. Continue reading
David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp) is leaving Medium for… a WordPress blog.
“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions.”
“Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.”
“With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”
I’ve been seeing articles (posts?) on Medium for six or seven years but never paid much attention. Here’s the Wikipedia page. Mr. Hansson’s post reads like Dave Winer from the early days of blogging.
“Nanos” for short. From the NYT story:
“People who have as few as 1,000 followers and are willing to advertise products on social media. Their lack of fame is one of the qualities that make them approachable. When they recommend a shampoo or a lotion or a furniture brand, their word seems as genuine as advice from a friend. In exchange for free products or a small commission, nanos typically say whatever companies tell them to.”
I gave up Twitter two years ago, never did Facebook and said goodbye to Google+ recently. Social media seemed only slightly less afflictive than opioid addiction. But this post by Kevin Drum offers a glimmer of hope:
The internet boasts an immediacy that allows it to pack a bigger punch than any previous medium. But this is hardly something new. Newspapers packed a bigger punch than the gossipmonger who appeared in your village every few weeks. Radio was more powerful than newspapers. TV was more powerful than radio. And social media is more powerful than TV.
Broadly speaking, the world is not worse than it used to be. We simply see far more of its dark corners than we used to, and we see them in the most visceral possible way: live, in color, and with caustic commentary.
The money quote: “If you want to make things better, you first have to convince people that something bad is happening. Social media does that.”
It’s that scene where all the seniors are gathered at the high school hangout, just before everyone heads off to college or the Army or a full-time job at Wal Mart. Everyone promises to keep in touch but knows they won’t. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made on Google+. I got in the car or on a plane to go meet some of you f2f.
But like everyone else, I could see this coming. I’m guessing a lot of folks will swing over to FB and reassemble there. Not an option for me. In fact, this was my last little toe-in-the-social media-water. I’ve been spending time one a Land Rover forum and feel comfortable with the focused/moderated environment. No politics, no ranting… just guys talking about their trucks.
I guess I’m still a little surprised nobody has figured out a way to do a paid social media platform. Sure seems like there would be a lot (okay, enough) people willing to pay, say, twenty bucks a year for an ad-free site. But no such thing exists as far as I know.