As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.
He was joking — sort of — but his comment made me think hard about who is served by this stuff. I’m concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will reduce us all to those characters in “Wall-E,” bound to their recliners, Big Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes.
.. But the impulse to conflate toothbrush delivery with Nobel Prize-worthy good works is not just a bit cultish, it’s currently a wildfire burning through the so-called innovation sector. Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (a.k.a. bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C. Z. Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”
.. Empathy, humility, compassion, conscience: These are the key ingredients missing in the pursuit of innovation
.. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where such companies are based, sea level rise is ominous, the income gap between rich and poor has been growing faster than in any other city in the nation, a higher percentage of people send their kids to private school than in almost any other city, and a minimum salary of $254,000 is required to afford an average-priced home. Who exactly is better off?
The Moral Economy of Technology
Their promoters and investors constantly moralize about their products, too. They do it so much that the goal of software “making the world a better place” is a stock joke, as in the show Silicon Valley. This kind of moral economy is not about justice or fairness. Instead it evangelizes social progress through technological disruption. This vision has deep historical roots that are uncomfortably entwined with the origins of the social sciences.
.. They almost all thought that authority in the society of the future would be grounded in scientific knowledge. They had fabulous plans for the role of scientists, including social scientists. They would constitute the supreme source of authority within the state.
.. The Saint-Simonian vision became what Hayek called “the religion of the engineers”, full of faith in the power of rational expertise. That religion is very much still with us.
.. Meanwhile, in recent years, the technology sector has massively accelerated the demand for the collection and analysis of data while also gradually diminishing the role of specifically social-scientific expertise in its evaluation. A few people are lucky enough to get access to private treasure-houses of data at places like Facebook or Uber. But mostly, these firms are managing and analyzing their data for themselves.
.. The first is the nice one. I associate it with the lives of people who live in Apple advertisements. It’s the feeling of something “just working”, that sense that a computer or device knows what you want it to do, or has anticipated a need that you have and acted on it in a pleasing way. It is a feeling of magic and delight, or at least a sense of ease and convenience.
.. But we may also be overly tempted to believe that these new technologies really are working as advertised. This may be because, even though our temperament is critical, Comte’s ideology of progress is still there in the marrow of our field.
.. If it doesn’t really work, another future presents itself—one where technologies are more like (in Maciej Cegłowski’s phrase) “money laundering for bias”
Offtime: Solution to Hyperconnectivity with your phone
We provide you with intuitive analytics of your phone usage, enabling you to identify your habits. Learn what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and how long for.
.. For a chosen period, block calls, texts and notifications that might disturb you. Select the people who can still get through, and we’ll make sure you don’t miss a thing. (Android only)
.. Welcome to the age of hyperconnectivity
Ev Williams became a billionaire by helping to create the free and open web. Now, he’s betting against it.
you might expect someone to recognize him. But as he gets on a downtown train, no one turns a head.
Despite serving as a board member at one of the five largest social networks, and a mainstay of the Bay Area tech industry for almost two decades, the kind of fame attached to the names of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, or the “Google guys” has eluded Williams.
.. His startups have nearly all specialized in the same abstract medium: text boxes.
.. In fact, you are reading this very story on the open web—unless you found it on the Facebook app on your phone, in which case you are reading a copy nearly identical to the open-web version of the story, except that yours loaded much faster and lives on Facebook’s servers.)
.. “I think the distribution points are going to consolidate.”
The distribution points are the search engines and the social networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, and the messaging apps. Also on that list are YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Facebook), Whatsapp (also owned by Facebook), and Facebook Messenger (ditto). By linking the web together, or hosting normally data-heavy content for free, these distribution nodes seize more and more users. And because each of the nodes is more interesting than any one individual’s personal site, people who used to go to personal sites wind up at the nodes instead.
.. The developers who wrote Drupal and WordPress, two important pieces of blogging software, both recently expressed anxiety over the open web’s future.
.. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, argues in his book The Master Switch that every major telecommunications technology has followed the same pattern: a brief, thrilling period of openness, followed by a monopolistic and increasingly atrophied closedness
.. “Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone—all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale,” he told me.
.. Josh Benton, a media critic at Harvard, once described Medium as “YouTube for prose,”
.. “I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people,”
.. They don’t have personal sites. … They don’t get personal.”
.. For all the talk of their radical openness, blogs had mostly been the domain of those with hosting space, programming experience, and the time to write them.
.. Odeo wanted to be to podcasts what Blogger was to blogs, but internet audio was still too disorganized for a business to succeed.
.. the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2007—was the most heated the aughts ever got in Silicon Valley. In this period, Google acquired YouTube, an 18-month-old company, for $1.6 billion. Facebook opened to all users, not just college students. TIME declared “You” the Person of the Year, a silly gimmick that nonetheless initiated the era of social-media hype. And Apple debuted the first iPhone.
.. the internet of 2008 can seem distant. That year’s presidential election was famously waged via web blogs. By 2012, much of the conversation had moved to Twitter.
.. “If your job was to feed people, but you were only measured by the efficiency of calories delivered, you may learn over time that high-calorie, high-processed foods were the most efficient ways to deliver calories,” he says
.. Medium’s marketing position isn’t far from Whole Foods either—it wants to be the big corporation that upscale customers trust.
.. Each of these sites still lives on its own domain name, but in terms of design and function, each is essentially a Medium page. Their stories also live on Medium’s servers.
.. Two years later, he founded Medium, describing it as a place for content that was too short for Blogger and too long for Twitter.
.. This is Medium’s reason for existing: to protect individual writers in the fierce and nasty content jungles.
.. It wants to do so by adopting many of the tics and habits of the original blogosphere—the intertextuality, the back-and-forth, the sense of amateurism
.. Medium, yes, will just be another platform, but it will run the open web in an emulator.
.. Google and Facebook, just two companies, send more than 80 percent of all traffic to news sites.
.. The web of 2008—the web that helped elect President Obama—has already withered.
.. but ours had more creativity, ours weren’t just for the money.