Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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For the second half of the 20th century, artists of all stripes were fed a Big Lie: namely, that when we created, we did so all on our lonesome. Our creative works were solely and wholly ours, sprung from our imagination, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.
Tracking Exposed is a scrappy European nonprofit that attempts to understand how online recommendation algorithms work. They comine data from volunteers who install a plugin with data acquired through “headless browsers,” to attempt to reverse-engineer the principles that determine what you see when you visit or search Tiktok, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook or Pornhub.
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover plunged the service into chaos: between mass layoffs, sweeping policy changes, reinstatement of known harassers and more ads in feeds that themselves were stuffed full of cackhanded algorithmic suggestions that displaced the posts from people you followed, there was cause for genuine alarm.
Even before Musk, Twitter had dabbled with enshittification, but under his low-attention-span, clownish management, Twitter’s enshittification engine shifted into ludicrous mode.
The enshittification of Twitter drove a mass exodus. Some users — who’d failed to learn the lesson of trusting in the beneficence of a benevolent dictatorship — fled to walled gardens like Hive and Post.
The ref has to be more powerful than the players.
When neoliberal economists began dismantling the regulatory state under Ronald Reagan (a process that has continued without interruption under every president, Republican and Democrat, since), they insisted that they weren’t so much concerned with regulation, but rather, regulatory capture.
Today, the phrase “regulatory capture” gets thrown around by people of all political persuasions, and is understood in a colloquial sense, meaning something like, “a regulator who is beholden to its industry and therefor makes bad regulations that run counter to the public interest.”
A read-only interlocutor is a robot troll.
In 1977, my father, a computer scientist, brought home a teletype terminal (a keyboard and a printer, no screen) and an acoustic coupler (a box with two suction-cups that matched up with the speaker and mic on the receiver of a standard Bell phone), and he connected it to the DEC PDP minicomputer at the University of Toronto. I was seven years old. I was hooked.
Continue reading "“Conversational” AI Is Really Bad At Conversations"
Richie’s Plank Experience is a terrifying VR game first released in 2016. In the game, the user rides up a simulated elevator to a rooftop that is 525 (simulated) feet above street level. Then, the user steps out on a (simulated) plank and walks out on it, over a vertiginous (simulated) drop.
There’s Nothing Wrong With Rolling Your Own.
Whenever something terrible happens on the internet — a coordinated harassment campaign on one of the big social media platforms, say, or a criminal conspiracy to traffick in child sex abuse images or promote a scammy cryptocurrency — inevitably we learn that this all took place in one of the net’s “dark corners.”
Three of my short stories that got it right…kinda.
I am on record on the subject of science fiction writers predicting the future: we do not. Thank goodness we don’t predict the future! If the future were predictable, then nothing any of us did would matter, because the same future would arrive, just the same. The unpredictability of the future is due to human agency, something the best science fiction writers understand to their bones. Fatalism is for corpses.
Back when we were inventing blogging, most posts did not have illustration, which was good for me, since I can’t draw so much as a stick figure, and there was precious little in the way of public domain or otherwise freely reusable stock art.
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”
The brush continued to move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth — stepped back to note the effect — added a touch here and there — criticised the effect again — Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:
“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”
– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
In 2003, a 19-year-old Harvard undergrad named Mark Zuckerberg had an idea: he’d create a website for Harvard students to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of their classmates. He called it Facemash.
Later that year, Zuckerberg changed the name of the site to The Facebook, and, in 2005, the site was renamed, simply, “Facebook.”