Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Aside Links

Transparency Follows After Trust Is Lost

Via Wired:

Speaking at Davos, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi pointed out that consumers face a challenge in trying to understand tech’s influence in the age of big data. He called this an “information asymmetry.” In his previous job, as CEO of Expedia, Khosrowshahi said, customers were shown a tropical island while they waited for their purchase page to show up. As a test, engineers replaced the placid image with a stressful one that showed a person missing a train. Purchases shot up. The company subbed in an even more stressful image of a person looking at a non-working credit card, and purchases rose again. One enterprising engineer decided to use image of a cobra snake. Purchases went higher.

What’s good for a business isn’t always good for that businesses’ users. Yet Khosrowshahi stopped testing because he decided the experiment wasn’t in line with the Expedia’s values. “A company starts having so much data and information about the user that if you describe it as a fight, it’s just not a fair fight,” said Khosrowshahi.

…

The tech industry often responds to these concerns with a promise to be more transparent—to better show how its products and services are created and how they impact us. But transparency, explained Rachel Botsman in the same Davos conversation, is not synonymous with trust. A visiting professor at the University of Oxford’s Said School, Botsman authored a book on technology and trust entitled “Who Can You Trust?” “You’ve actually given up on trust if you need for things to be transparent,” she said. “We need to trust the intention of these companies.”

I think that it’s how little design flourishes are used to imperceptibly influence consumers that should be used to justify more intensive ethics and legal education to designers and engineers. Engineers of physical structures belong to formal associations that can evaluate the appropriateness of their members’ creations and conduct. Maybe it’s time for equivalent professional networks to be build for the engineers and developers who are building the current era’s equivalents to bridges, roads, and motor vehicles.

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Photography

Sacrifice

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Quotations

Deliberate Sharing

Every time you share a link, or a piece of news, you are actually telling people to look at it. You are asking them to spend their biggest resource — attention (and time) — on what you are sharing.

Om Malik, “(Social) share, but with care”
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Quotations

On Facebook’s Woes

There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?”

Nick Bilton, ““This Is Serious”: Facebook Begins It’s Downward Spiral”

As much as I’d like to believe that users will flee Facebook, I still think the network effect will keep them inside the company’s heavily walled garden. It’ll take a new generation using new applications and interested in different kinds of content creation — and Facebook not buying up whatever is popular to that generation — for the company’s grasp to be loosened.

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Aside

2018.1.27

iOS is still incredibly janky. Since updating to iOS 11 I’ve had to periodically do full device resets in order to stop podcasts from trying (and failing) to download in perpetuity; there’s no other was I’ve found to stop the process and, if I don’t, the battery drain rate is approximately 10-15% per hour, when the device is just sitting idle. And on a device that only has wireless service (no mobile data connection) I have to turn the wireless radios on and off about once per week to get Siri to actually take requests. Without a doubt this version of iOS is the worst I’ve ever had to muddle through…

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Quotations

On Being Alone

“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.”

Osho
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Photography Roundup Writing

The Roundup for January 20-26, 2018 Edition

Terminus, 2018, Toronto by Christopher Parsons

I’ve been thinking about how high technology is continuing to develop at a pace that outruns the least well off in our Western societies. I think that this was best crystallized in Amazon’s opening of its first Amazon Go store, which does away with cashiers and replaces them with cameras and sensors that automatically identify what you acquire for purchase and charge you as you leave the space. There are at least three (immediate) concerns that strike me with regard to these kinds of technologies:

  1. As noted by Hanna Brooks Olsen, these are inherently cashless technologies. Consumers will enter the store with their smartphones, cameras and sensors will track them, and be billed automatically to their debit or credit card(s) associated with the Amazon account. For persons who have a hard time acquiring a smartphone, or having it repaired when damaged, or opening a bank account or obtaining a credit card, or possessing a language barrier, or without access to a convenient and reliable place to charge their devices, or those who rely on the cash economy, these kinds of ‘convenient’ stores are nearly impenetrable fortresses. Those who cannot enter and purchase goods in the stores will be those who are often the least privileged and, rather than being confronted by the diversity of the human population, shoppers in Amazon Go-type stores will have some portion of society’s diversity simply deleted from their shopping experience. As stated by Olsen, “cashless life … is necessarily one of privilege.”
  2. These are anti-labour technologies. In promoting ‘convenience’ Amazon Go and equivalent technologies remove a certain portion of low skill jobs that many people depend on for their livelihoods. While the popular conception is that it’s just students who have these kinds of jobs, simply looking at service jobs belies this point: the age groups which have sales or sales service jobs are rising, and this is exacerbated by an older population who has to work longer into their retirement years simply to survive, let alone thrive. By removing, or at least significantly reducing, the number of low-skill jobs the numbers of persons who are struggling and unable to find work will increase and their social hardships be exacerbated.1
  3. Cashless systems and those which remove labourers are inherently political technologies. They are technologies designed for a particular set of people, to solve what one group in society regards as ‘problems’, and which could significantly reshape how elements of society operate. Should these technologies cease to be ‘technology’ per se and be normalized as ‘infrastructure’ then it will be challenging to ‘reformat and replace’ the technology and ameliorate its long-term social impacts.2 Transforming cashless into infrastructure threatens to deepen the the aforementioned difficulties.

Aren’t there solutions to the aforementioned problems? Of course there are. But any solutions will likely impose costs on those who are developing, advocating for, and using convenience technologies that detrimentally affect the least well off or privileged. Solutions might entail:

  • establishing a guaranteed way for all persons to obtain banking accounts with diminished identification or language requirements;3
  • providing either a basic living wage or reducing the barriers to accessing social welfare benefits, to offset the reduction of low-skill employment opportunities; or
  • reducing educational costs or fully subsidizing such costs so that we as a society can improve the educational status of many of those affected by shrinking low-skill labour. However, education is often seen as the silver bullet when it should be regarded as a tarnished and dented brass shield instead: educational requirements for mid-skilled labour may be too onerous for some persons who have mental, psychological, or physical challenges. Similarly, if there is a major gap between initial education and when it is (re)required, such as when a middle income person loses their job after 25+ years of performing the same tasks, then a short 6- or 12-month course may be insufficient. Education may help to address some job loss linked to convenient technologies but education, alone, is insufficient to ‘solve’ the social challenges linked with such technologies and infrastructures.

It’s pretty rare that major news reports about novel and emerging technologies are accompanied with real-work implications of the technologies, should they transform to infrastructure. It’s even rarer for minor news reports to consider the social, ethical, or political implications of new technologies. Instead, the focuses tend to be on whether a new user interface is ‘fun’ or ‘convenient enough’ or ‘fast enough’. Those are the concerns of the majority. We need to far more seriously consider how our developing technologies will affect those least well off, or else risk further stratifying social and economic divides and widening the rift between the most and least privileged members of society.

Quotation of the Week

“We cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed.”

– Ruth Messinger

Great Photography Shots

I really appreciated the humour in these urban camouflage shots!

Music I’m Digging

Neat Podcast Episodes

Good Reads for the Week

Cool Things

Footnotes

  1. The current Amazon Go location does have employees working there, just not as cashiers, and the company hasn’t taken the population of would-be-cashiers and moved them to other locations. The very point is to remove cashiers as an occupation and number of employees from the experience. ↩
  2. If you’re interested in this line of analysis — that technology is inherently political — I’d suggest reading Langdon Winner’s book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in the Age of High Technology. ↩
  3. One of the challenges to obtaining a bank account is that customers may require a fixed address, telephone number, or other identifiers. While such identifiers are often stable and available to the majority of the population they are fluid for those who lack secure housing, employment, and other ‘normal’ components of daily living. ↩
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Writing

Next Level Coffee Snobbery

I haven’t brewed a typical ‘cup’ of coffee at home for over three years. I drink 1-3 cups a day but in a particular coffee-snob kind of way.

I’ve been exclusively brewed using an Aeropress.

An Aeropress is basically a vacuum plunger where you attach a filter to the bottom of a plastic tube, load grounds into the tube, and after adding water and stirring the grounds, plunge water through the grounds. I wasn’t initially using a particularly ‘nice’ kettle and so wasn’t regulating the water temperature very rigorously. Despite this, the simple shift from a coffee maker-made coffee to Aeropress represented a a massive step-up in my morning coffee experience.

Enter a Proper Kettle

A few years ago I bought the Cuisinart CPK-17 PerfecTemp Cordless Electric Kettle so that I could precisely heat my water to the temperature I wanted. This kettle will let you select one of six preset temperatures (160°, 175°, 185°, 190°, 200°, and Boil) whereas a normal kettle is far less specific in the temperature it can consistently reach.

The Aeropress plus Cuisinart combination plus good coffee beans that were recently roasted (i.e. within a week or so) has always resulted in pretty good coffee. But if you spend time looking at the Aeropress championships that take place around the world, and the recipes that the baristas use, you find that they measure out the beans and water by weight.1

Weighing Everything Out

I got a scale for Christmas to weight out the amounts of water and coffee beans I use in making coffee. I’m using an American Weigh Scales (SG-2KG) Digital Pocket Scale. After trying it out I learned something profound: I’ve been using almost the precise amounts of boiling water and coffee beans as many of the most popular Aeropress recipes!2

I’m guessing that the scale will ensure that I’m better able to control for quality each time, and so instead of almost nailing the perfect balance of water and beans I’ll have a ‘perfect press’ more regularly. I’ll also be able to try out other recipes with accuracy and confidence. But it was surprising to learn that despite adding the extra coffee gear it’s actual improvements may be less significant than I’d expected.

Now I just have to upgrade to an even better burr grinder…

  1. They also have a specific number of times they’ll churn the water over the coffee, break up when they add water, and more. It gets pretty complicated and ritualistic. ↩
  2. The technique varies between the recipes I’ve looked at, but weights are pretty consistent. ↩
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Photography Videos

Collecting Objects vs Collecting Potential In Photography

I really appreciated this short but poignant interview of Joel Meyerowitz. He has an interesting assessment of the difference between a SLR and rangefinder-style camera (one blinds you to half the world whereas the other lets you see the frame and what is around the frame) and how photography has the potential to transform the unrelated into the real, the imagined, or the potential.

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Aside

2018.1.24

I’ve decided to try enabling comments on this blog; historically I’ve found that spam is such a pain to manage that comments just aren’t worth it. But I’m willing to try again and see if the value gained from comments exceeds the cost in managing spammers.