Category Archives: Media & Culture
The end of capitalism has begun
The provocative headline of this article (by Paul Mason in The Guardian) is enough to make some dismiss it out of hand. I hope you’ll give these excerpts a quick scan and, if you see something interesting, click through to the article.
- Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.
- We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.
- The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.
- Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse.”
- By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
- The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.
- The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.
We are data: the future of machine intelligence (2015)
“Artificial Intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyze it using computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking — even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to replicate human neural networks, and connected together form even larger artificial neural networks.”
This is from an article by Douglas Coupland. Maybe one of the more frightening things I’ve read about data collection. Let’s start with a few of one-liners:
“Amazon can tell if you’re straight or gay within seven purchases.”
“Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.”
“The amount of internet freedom we have right now is the most we’re ever going to get.”
He starts his piece with a description of an imaginary app called Wonkr. I had to read this a few times to decide if he was serious or not.
“You put Wonkr on your phone and it asks you a quick set of questions about your beliefs. Then, the moment there are more than a few people around you (who also have Wonkr), it tells you about the people you’re sharing the room with. You’ll be in a crowded restaurant in Nashville and you can tell that 73 per cent of the room is Republican. Go into the kitchen and you’ll see that it’s 84 per cent Democrat. You’ll be in an elevator in Manhattan and the higher you go, the percentage of Democrats shrinks. Go to Germany — or France or anywhere, really — and Wonkr adapts to local politics. The thing to remember is: Wonkr only activates in crowds. If you’re at home alone, with the apps switched off, nobody can tell anything about you.”
“Wonkr’s job is to tell you the political temperature of a busy space. “Am I among friends or enemies?” But then you can easily change the radius of testability. Instead of just the room you’re standing in, make it of the block or the whole city — or your country. Wonkr is a de facto polling app. Pollsters are suddenly out of a job: Wonkr tells you — with astonishing accuracy — who believes what, and where they do it.”
“Wonkr is a free app but why not help it by paying say, 99 cents, to allow it to link you with people who think just like you. Remember, to sign on to Wonkr you have to take a relatively deep quiz. Maybe 155 questions, like the astonishingly successful eHarmony.com.”
If you’re busy, put this aside until you have 10 minutes. It’s packed tighter than cocaine mule’s carry-on.
How to hire radio talent
Mark Ramsey is a “media strategist, researcher and trend-maker.” What we used to call a consultant. Here’s part of his answer to the question: “what qualifications should we be looking for in talent, programming, and sales that are different from today’s conventional qualifications?”
For talent, nothing else will be more important than that talent’s skill and engagement with social media and digital platforms.
Here’s some questions he’d ask before hiring:
- How big is your personal audience, the one you have direct relationships with, as measured by social media?
- How many Twitter followers do you have?
- How big is your Facebook fan page, and how strong is your engagement?
- How many Instagram followers and likes do you have?
- How many YouTube subscribers and total views do you have?
- Do you have a website for your own brand?
- How big is your brand’s personal email list? How often do you send out email? What do you send?
- What podcasts do you produce? How much listenership do they receive? How many podcast subscribers do you have?
“In other words, to what degree do you – the talent – take responsibility for building your own personal brand? And how can you demonstrate the power of that brand to me?”
I think he’s right. As I’ve watch social media grow and evolve I’ve wondered how I would have fared in this new media environment. Glad I didn’t miss the “spinning records” era.
The people formerly known as advertisers
Media researcher Gordon Borrell says “we’ve reached the end of the Golden Age of Advertising.”
- 82% of SMBs have established their own media channel in the form of a website or social media page.
- Since 2007, spending has skyrocketed to the point at which businesses last year spent 72% more on marketing services and promotions than they had spent 10 years earlier. Meanwhile, the annual expenditure on local advertising was 22% less than it was a decade ago.
- “Over the next 12 months, the gap will almost certainly widen to the point that all traditional advertising channels — print, broadcast, outdoor and mail — begin to look like niche support mechanisms to a local businesses’ digital marketing plan.”
Dick, from the Internet
Ray Van Hooser
Ray Van Hooser was on the original staff of KBOA.
The Lumpkin Family
I’d watch a TV show based on a 50’s era family that made their living performing on small town radio stations. I might make one or both of the children “little people” passing as kids. Maybe the wife transgender. The gimmick would be they are all very talented but couldn’t make it as solo acts and discover — by humorous accident — that they’re a hit as a family. The thing practically writes itself.
The AI we confront will be us
From an article by Tim O’Reilly
“When news of import spreads around the world in moments, is this not the awareness in some kind of global brain? When an idea takes hold in millions of individual minds, and is reinforced by repetition across our silicon networks, is it not a persistent thought?”
It’s a rare day I don’t “ask Google” a question. Usually several. Increasingly, Google provides a useful answer. As this bit of magic becomes commonplace, the line between Me and the Net becomes thinner and thinner and will soon disappear. (Already, perhaps?) My mind (whatever that is) feels like it’s escaping the cramped confines of my head and it feels wonderful.
“AI that we will confront is not going to be a mind in an individual machine. It will not be something we look at as other. It may well be us.”
As our Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal ancestors slowly became what we are today?
Abortion: A positive social good
“I am pro-abortion like I’m pro-knee-replacement and pro-chemotherapy and pro-cataract surgery. As the last protection against ill-conceived childbearing when all else fails, abortion is part of a set of tools that help women and men to form the families of their choosing. I believe that abortion care is a positive social good. I suspect that a lot of other people secretly believe the same thing. And I think it’s time we said so.”