Tag: Technology

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Writing

Dromology in the Age of Synthetic Cognition

Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist well known for his theory of dromology. Dromology explores the logics and impacts of speed in the modern era. At its core, it theorizes how the velocity of action or decision-making enables actors to accrue wealth and power over others. Virilio often approached this concept through the lens of martial power, contemplating how new means of movement — the horse, the automobile, telemetric control — created new capacities to overcome the frictions of time and space, and to overcome adversaries through heightened sensing and accelerated decision-making.

We exist in an era of digital intensification. Cybernetic systems are now core to many people’s daily realities, including systems over which they have little meaningful influence or control.1 Earlier digital modernity was often described as an “attention economy.” Today, we may be entering what I’ll call a “velocity economy,” which is increasingly grappling with the implications of a faster-moving world.

Escape Velocities

Om Malik has written recently on velocity and how it may now precede attention as a structuring condition:

What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.

…

Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain.

…

When velocity becomes the scarcest resource, everything orients around it. This is why it’s wrong to think of “the algorithm” as some quirky technical layer that can be toggled on and off or worked around. The algorithm is the culture. It decides what gets amplified, who gets to make a living, and what counts as “success.”

Once velocity is the prize, quality becomes risky. Thoughtfulness takes time. Reporting takes time. Living with a product or an idea takes time. Yet the window for relevance keeps shrinking, and the penalty for lateness is erasure. We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes. The network doesn’t ask if something is correct or durable, only if it moves. If it moves, the system will find a way to monetize it.2

The creation and publication of content — and the efforts to manipulate engagement metrics to juice algorithms — have long been partially automated. Bot and content farms are not new. What may be new is the scale and ease of synthesis. As the cost of producing text, images, summaries, and responses to each declines through the widespread adoption of LLMs and agentic systems, the volume of generated material increases dramatically.

That increase in volume does not just mean “more noise.” It alters competitive dynamics and means that velocity — which then accrues attention — becomes key in an algorithmically intermediated world. In this environment what is increasingly put under pressure are decisional latencies — the time between sensing, synthesizing, and acting. And humans are making decisions on what to focus on based on automations and algorithms designed to cull out what they “should” be paying attention to.

Earlier digital acceleration primarily affected distribution: messages moved faster, and telemetrics enabled the expression of power at heightened distances, as examples. Now we may be witnessing the acceleration of what looks like cognition. LLMs have no theory of mind insofar as they do not “understand” in any human sense. Yet they can synthesize, summarize, categorize, and prioritize at speeds that mimic cognitive activity. And when those synthesized outputs are connected to agentic systems capable of taking action — filing forms, executing transactions, triggering workflows — we move beyond accelerated messaging into accelerated execution. Decisional latencies can become compressed in order to produce outputs that move sufficiently fast, and with sufficient purchase, to be registered by algorithms as worthy of amplification and, ultimately, human attention.

Put differently: as velocity becomes a mode of capturing attention there is pressure to move more quickly in the face of other, similarly fast-moving outputs, and in ways that potentially exploit or game algorithms in an effort to obtain human attention.

New Velocity, New Harms

For Virilio, every accelerant technology carried with it a corresponding accident. The invention of the ship implied the shipwreck. The car led to the car crash. Radio and telecommunications enabled new forms of propaganda and coordinated deception. And so on.

LLMs and agentic systems may carry their own accident structures. They enable mass automated persuasion at scale. A flaw in a widely deployed foundation model could result in class-breaking errors replicated across applications dependent on that model.3

Agentic systems introduce further risks: cascading autonomous mis-executions, rapid propagation of flawed decisions, and compounding feedback loops that create significant problems before humans detect them.4

AI accidents have the potential to be more distributed and more simultaneous than prior automation failures. While automated systems have long-posed risks the generalized and cross-sector nature of foundation models could expand the blast radius of automated harms. When many systems rely on shared models or shared training data, correlated failures become more plausible.

Velocity, in this sense, does not merely amplify error; it compresses the window in which errors can be identified and corrected. It risks creating brittle systems and generating what Charles Perrow has called “normal accidents.”

Velocity and Organizational Impacts

If decisional latency becomes the friction to be minimized in a velocity economy, organizations may feel pressure to shorten analytic cycles and accelerate workflow tempos. In domains where speed confers agenda-setting power, organizations may need to move faster or risk marginalization.

At the same time, we might see a divide emerge. Some institutions may further prioritize velocity and first-mover visibility as a way to shape agendas. Others may deliberately preserve slower processes to protect legitimacy and safety. Friction — often treated as inefficiency — may be read as functioning as a source of institutional credibility.5 It may, also, be used by some organizations to justify their resistance to innovation and with the effect of falling behind other actors.

As information volume expands, organizations and individuals may increasingly depend on third-party systems to track, assess, and prioritize what is “meaningful.” LLMs and agentic systems may be paired with other automated triage systems designed to impose order on informational abundance.

Yet such sense-making is inherently lossy. The world is dense with detail, contingency, contradiction, and edge cases. When LLMs normalize information statistically, much of that raw specificity can be abstracted away. The effect can be that important context is never surfaced for human review; reliance on abstracted assessment systems to navigate a digitally intermediated world may entail a further loss of representational fidelity.

This abstraction is not unprecedented — humans have always distilled complexity — but the scale and automation of the distillation may be new. And as (or if) human review recedes the capacity to interrogate what has been smoothed over may diminish.

Organizations must also determine when they will introduce human review as well as when they will deliberately refrain from doing so. Prioritizing human assessment of all outputs could introduce friction that other organizations or jurisdictions may not demand. A majority-human-review organization may operate outside the dominant tempo of a velocity economy, with the end of potentially gaining legitimacy and safety while simultaneously sacrificing influence or timeliness.

Organizational Consequences of LLM and Agentic Velocity

If LLM- and agentic-enabled systems increase the rate at which information is generated and decisions are executed, several consequences may follow.

  1. The distribution of power may become linked to access to compute, to foundational models, to reliable data, and to the capacity to act digitally or physically. Countries that dominate the production — or regulation — of foundational models may accrue disproportionate influence. Where production and regulation of AI models or systems diverge between nation-states or geopolitical regions, conflicts over norms and authority may intensify.
  2. Organizations may need fast initial outputs to secure attention in a velocity-based information environment. However, rapid outputs need not be final outputs. Deeper analysis may continue in parallel, informing subsequent action and ensuring that longer-term activities based on such analysis remain well grounded in facts and aligned with strategic priorities. Organizations that excel at this two-track approach to knowledge production may gain strategic benefits in being able to set agendas as well as subsequently navigate them with complexity, depth, and institutional integrity.
  3. Where agentic systems are entrusted to make certain classes of judgments, institutions must determine under what conditions (and to what extent) they will add the friction of human oversight. The more friction introduced, the greater the potential divergence from competitors operating at full automation speed. At the same time, human-informed decision-making may confer benefits of perceived legitimacy and safety.
  4. Institutions must carefully consider how they can, and cannot, adopt LLMs and agentic systems so they are responsive to changes in the lived reality of the world while at the same time working to carefully protect social trust that they possess. There may be increased pressures on institutions to align their decisional horizons with machine-accelerated and innovation-driven time horizons, perhaps requiring shifts in decisions from slow and fixed in time, to more fast moving and subject to routine revisions. For bureaucratic organizations or institutions this could require major changes6 in decisional structures and processes.

Future Looking Velocity-Imposed Pressures

If we are to take Virilio’s insights seriously, along with changes in technological activity per Malik’s thoughts, then there are at least three tensions worth watching:

  1. Organizations with access to contemporary models may be able to move more quickly and accurately, with the effect of reducing the time delta in summarizing or producing information while compressing decisional cycles. At risk, however, is whether this elides the specificity that is reflective of the actual world and has the effect of delegitimizing actual decisions as a result of minimal (or insufficient) human oversight or governance. To what extent might LLM- and agentic-forward organizations make bad decisions more quickly and undermine their legitimacy? How much will access to contemporary models differentiate between organizations’ abilities to undertake rapid-pace sense-making and decision making?
  2. Epistemic pressures may worsen as synthetic media is produced at scale and automated intermediaries filter what humans encounter. What happens when your digital assistant, or one your organization relies on, has been sorting content for months, only for you to discover it has been amplifying propaganda because of model poisoning or bias you did not anticipate? What to do when the decisions you’ve been making have unknowingly been badly torqued to the advantage of other parties?
  3. Class-breaks that result in cascading failures become more plausible in monocultural model ecosystems. To what extent does widespread reliance on common foundation models create systemic points of failure that are difficult to detect, diagnose, or correct? Will this encourage the development of more ‘small models’ in an effort to stem or mitigate these kinds of security impacts?

Virilio suggested that speed restructures power. Malik suggests that velocity now structures visibility and attention. If LLMs and agentic systems compress not only communication but also enable synthetic cognition and decisional executions, then the next few years may test whether institutions can preserve legitimacy, trust, and factually-driven actions and decisions in a world increasingly oriented around motion.

It will be interesting to assess whether friction comes to be seen increasingly as an obstacle to wealth or power, or whether organizations that maintain appropriate degrees of friction preserve (or expand) their legitimacy relative to those that move quickly and break things.

  1. Examples include automated bots interacting with global capital markets, and the automated balancing of critical infrastructure systems to enable seamless continued services. ↩︎
  2. Emphasis not in original. ↩︎
  3. In computer security, a “class-break” refers to a vulnerability in a widely used underlying technology such that an exploit affecting one instantiation effectively compromises the entire class of systems built upon it. For example, a flaw in a common cryptographic library can render all software relying on that library vulnerable simultaneously. ↩︎
  4. If humans even ever do detect them… ↩︎
  5. While not taken up, here, this divide between moving quickly versus slowly may have interesting implications for agenda-setting windows, and the development and proposals of policy problems and solutions. ↩︎
  6. Perhaps even existential changes! ↩︎
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Links Writing

Tech for Whom?

Charley Johnson has a good line of questions and critique for any organization or group which is promoting a ‘technology for good’ program. The crux is that any and all techno-utopian proposals suggest a means of technology to solve a problem as defined by the party making the proposal. Put another way, these kinds of solutions do not tend to solve real underlying problems but, instead, solve the ‘problems’ for which hucksters have build a pre-designed a ‘solution’.

This line of analysis isn’t new, per se, and follows in a long line of equity, social justice, feminism, and critical theory writers. Still, Johnson does a good job in extracting key issues with techno-utopianism. Key, is that any of these solutions tend to present a ‘tech for good’ mindset that:

… frames the problem in such a way that launders the interests, expertise, and beliefs of technologists…‘For good’ is problematic because it’s self-justifying. How can I question or critique the technology if it’s ‘for good’? But more importantly, nine times out of ten ‘for good’ leads to the definition of a problem that requires a technology solution.

One of the things that we are seeing more commonly is the use of data, in and of itself, as something that can be used for good: data for good initiatives are cast as being critical to solving climate change, making driving safer, or automating away the messier parties of our lives. Some of these arguments are almost certainly even right! However, the proposed solutions tend to rely on collecting, using, or disclosing data—derived from individuals’ and communities’ activities—without obtaining their informed, meaningful, and ongoing consent. ‘Data for good’ depends, first and often foremost, on removing the agency to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a given ‘solution’.

In the Canadian context efforts to enable ‘good’ uses of data have emerged through successively introduced pieces of commercial privacy legislation. The legislation would permit the disclosure of de-identified personal information for “socially beneficial purposes.” Information could be disclosed to government, universities, public libraries, health care institutions, organizations mandated by the government to carry out a socially beneficial purpose, and other prescribed entities. Those organizations could use the data for a purpose related to health, the provision or improvement of public amenities or infrastructure, the protection of the environment or any other prescribed purpose.

Put slightly differently, whereas Johnson’s analysis is towards a broad concept of ‘data for good’ in tandem with elucidating examples, the Canadian context threatens to see broad-based techno-utopian uses of data enabled at the legislative level. The legislation includes the ability to expand whom can receive de-identified data and the range of socially beneficial uses, with new parties and uses being defined by regulation. While there are a number of problems with these kinds of approaches—which include the explicit removal of consent of individuals and communities to having their data used in ways they may actively disapprove of—at their core the problems are associated with power: the power of some actors to unilaterally make non-democratic decisions that will affect other persons or communities.

This capacity to invisibly express power over others is the crux of most utopian fantasies. In such fantasies, power relationships are resolved in the absence of making them explicit and, in the process, an imaginary is created wherein social ills are fixed as a result of power having been hidden away. Decision making in a utopia is smooth and efficient, and the power asymmetries which enable such situations is either hidden away or just not substantively discussed.

Johnson’s article concludes with a series of questions that act to re-surface issues of power vis-a-vis explicitly raising questions of agency and the origin and nature of the envisioned problem(s) and solution(s):

Does the tool increase the self-determination and agency of the poor?

Would the tool be tolerated if it was targeted at non-poor people?

What problem does the tool purport to solve and who defined that problem?

How does the way they frame the problem shape our understanding of it?

What might the one framing the problem gain from solving it?

We can look to these questions as, at their core, raising issues of power—who is involved in determining how agency is expressed, who has decision-making capabilities in defining problems and solutions—and, through them, issues of inclusion and equity. Implicit through his writing, at least to my eye, is that these decisions cannot be assigned to individuals but to individuals and their communities.

One of the great challenges for modern democratic rule making is that we must transition from imagining political actors as rational, atomic, subjects to ones that are seen as embedded in their community. Individuals are formed by their communities, and vice versa, simultaneously. This means that we need to move away from traditional liberal or communitarian tropes to recognize the phenomenology of living in society, alone and together simultaneously, while also recognizing and valuing the tilting power and influence of ‘non-rational’ aspects of life that give life much of its meaning and substance. These elements of life are most commonly those demonized or denigrated by techno-utopians on the basis that technology is ‘rational’ and is juxtaposed against the ‘irrationality’ of how humans actually live and operate in the world.

Broad and in conclusion, then, techno-utopianism is functionally an issue of power and domination. We see ‘tech bros’ and traditional power brokers alike advancing solutions to their perceived problems, and this approach may be further reified should legislation be passed to embed this conceptual framework more deeply into democratic nation-states. What is under-appreciated is that while such legislative efforts may make certain techno-utopian activities lawful the subsequent actions will not, as a result, necessarily be regarded as legitimate by those affected by the lawful ‘socially beneficial’ uses of de-identified personal data.

The result? At best, ambivalence that reflects the population’s existing alienation from democratic structures of government. More likely, however, is that lawful but illegitimate expressions of ‘socially beneficial’ uses of data will further delegitimize the actions and capabilities of the states, with the effect of further weakening the perceived inclusivity of our democratic traditions.

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Reviews Writing

Book Review: Blockchain Chicken Farm And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside (2020) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Xiaowei Wang’s book, Blockchain Chicken Farm And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, presents a nuanced and detailed account of the lives reality of many people in China through the lenses of history, culture, and emerging technologies. She makes clear through her writing that China is undergoing a massive shift through efforts to digitize the economy and society (and especially rural economies and societies) while also effectively communicating why so many of these initiatives are being undertaken. 

From exploring the relationship between a fraught cold chain and organic chicken, to attempts to revitalize rural villages by turning them into platform manufacturing towns, to thinking through and reflecting on the state of contemporary capitalistic performativity in rural China and the USA alike, we see how technologies are being used to try and ‘solve’ challenges while often simultaneously undermining and endangering the societies within which they are embedded. Wang is careful to ensure that a reader leaves with an understanding of the positive attributes of how technologies are applied while, at the same time, making clear how they do not remedy—and, in fact, often reify or extenuate—unequal power relationships. Indeed, many of the positive elements of technologies, from the perspective of empowering rural citizens or improving their earning powers, are either being negatively impacted by larger capitalistic actors or the technology companies whose platforms many of these so-called improvements operate upon. 

Wang’s book, in its conclusion, recognizes that we need to enhance and improve upon the cultural spaces we operate and live within if we are to create a new or reformed politics that is more responsive to the specific needs of individuals and their communities. Put differently, we must tend to the dynamism of the Lifeworld if we are to modify the conditions of the System that surrounds, and unrelentingly colonizes, the Lifeworld. 

Her wistful ending—that such efforts of (re)generation are all that we can do—speaks both to a hope but also an almost resignation that (re)forming the systems we operate in can only take place if we manage to avoid being distracted by the bauble or technology that is dangled in front of us, to distract us from the existential crises facing our societies and humanity writ large. As such, it concludes very much in the spirit of our times: with hope for the future but a fearful resignation that despite our best efforts, we may be too late to succeed. But, what else can we do?

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Aside Links

Brian Eno on Atomization and Underlining

Really appreciated this interview with Eno. Two select quotations that stuck with me:

Something that kind of disappoints me is that most of the new technology from the ’80s onwards has been about the atomization of society. It’s been about you being able to be more and more separate from everybody else. That’s why I don’t like the headphones thing. I don’t want to be separate in that way.

I can’t say that I agree with this assessment, but understand that technology is wrapped up in a very particular culture of neoliberal capitalism that can be harmful for communities writ large. His subsequent reflections more broadly about social media—that it can create the almost total self-enclosure of micro-communities—is definitely something that raises prominent concerns, though frankly I wish that there was more scholarship that dug into this as an issue as took place about 15 or so years ago. Obviously there is new scholarship but little of it seems methodologically satisfactory with focuses on quantitative rather than qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Quite a few of the films I’ve made music for, I never saw the picture before I finished all the music. And I like that, because I don’t want the music to map totally onto the film. I want the music to suggest — to increase the ambiguity, basically. To expand the film a bit. Not to underline it. Often, and especially with Hollywood soundtracks, the whole point of the soundtrack is to tell you, the dumb sod watching it, “Now you’re supposed to feel sad. Now it’s funny. Laugh! Go on!” And I just don’t want to be in that business of underlining things.

This seems like a pretty stellar way of thinking through what he wants his work to do, and not do. Though in a contemporary era I’m surprised that producers or directors are willing to leave the music so out of their control.

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Links Photography Roundup Writing

The Roundup for April 1-30, 2020 Edition

(Unhoused by Christopher Parsons)

(Unhoused by Christopher Parsons)

Welcome to this edition of The Roundup! Enjoy the collection of interesting, informative, and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee or grab yourself a drink, find a comfortable place, and relax.

Inspiring Quotation

When you give something, you’re in much greater control. But when you receive something, you’re so vulnerable.

I think the greatest gift you can ever give is an honest receiving of what a person has to offer.
– Fred Rogers

Great Photography Shots

Some of the photos for the 2020 All About Photos Awards are just terrific.

“Jump of the wildebeest” © Nicole Cambre. 5th Place, All About Photo Awards.

“Beyond the wall” © Francesco Pace Rizzi. Particular Merit Mention, All About Photo Awards

“The Wallace’s Flying Frog” © Chin Leong Teo. Particular Merit Mention, All About Photo Awards

“Step by Step” © Mustafa AbdulHadi. Particular Merit Mention, All About Photo Awards

Untitled © Yoni Blau. Particular Merit Mention, All About Photo Awards

Woman Mursi © Svetlin Yosifov. Particular Merit Mention, All About Photo Awards

Music I’m Digging

My April best-of playlist features some classic alternative and a lot of not-so-new rap and R&B. I guess this is the first full playlist I’ve created purely when in self-isolation?

Neat Podcast Episodes

  • Lawfare-Jim Baker in FISA Errors // Baker previously was responsible for, in part, reviewing the FISA applications put before the FISC. Recently, the DOJ IG found that 29 of 29 applications they reviewed had errors, including a seeming failure to document or prove the facts set out in the applications. Baker assessed the legal implications as well as the normative implications of the deficits, and the need to develop stronger managerial control over all future applications.
  • CBC Ideas—The Shakespeare Conspiracy // Using Shakespeare as a kind of distancing tool—he’s long dead and so unlikely to enliven contemporary political passions—Paul Budra explores how different scholars and public intellectuals have asserted who Shakespeare ’really was’ and the rationales behind such assertions. In an era where the West is increasingly concerned about the rise of conspiracies this espisode provides a range of productive tools to assess and critique new and emerging conspiracies.
  • NPR throughline—Buzzkill // Mosquitos are, without a doubt, responsible for more human deaths than anything else on earth. This superb short podcast goes through how mosquitos have been essential to empire, warfare, and changes to humans’ genetic makeup.

Good Reads

  • The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic // Anderson has done a spectacular job showcasing the beautiful humanity of Weird Al. In tracing his origin story, and explaining the care and time Al puts into his work, and the love he has for his fans, you really appreciate just how lovely a man he is. If anyone is a Tom Hanks for the geeks, it may end up being Weird Al.
  • There Is a Racial Divide in Speech-Recognition Systems, Researchers Say // It’s as though having engineers of particular ethnicities, building products that work for them, while also lacking employees of other ethnicities, has implications for developing technology. And the same is true of when developers do not include people with diverse socio-legal or socio-economic backgrounds.
  • The chemistry of cold-brew coffee is so hot right now // God bless the coffee-obsessed scientists who’ve taken a deep dive into the way that coffee beans respond to different extraction methods, as well as provide their own cold brew recipes. I can’t wait to see what research percolates out of this lab going forward!
  • What’s the Deal With False Burrs? // Having only recently managed to properly clean my home grinder, I was curious to learn a bit more about the differences in burr grinders. While I’m satisfied with my current grinder I can predict—based in owning a ‘faux’ burr grinder—that a Baratza Encore or Virtuoso is in my near future.
  • LIDAR: Peek Into The Future With iPad Pro // The recent release of the newest iPad Pro iteration has been met with a lot of yawns by reviewers. That makes a lot of sense, given the combination of the ongoing crisis and relatively minimal changes over the 2018 iPad Pro. The only really major new thing is a LIDAR system that is now part of the camera bump, but no mainstream reviewers have really assessed its capabilities. Fortunately the folks from Halide—a smartphone camera company—have dug into what LIDAR brings (and doesn’t bring) to the floor. Their review is helpful and, also, raises the question of whether professionals who do modelling should be consulted on the utility of these kinds of features, just as photographers—not gadget reviewers—should be asked deep and probing questions about the cameras that are integrated into smart devices these days.
  • The Mister Rogers No One Saw // Fred Rogers has had a number of films made about him and his life, but this essay by Jeanne Marie Laskas is different because it is so deeply personal about the relationships Fred had with those around him, and with the author. He inhabited a world that was just a little bit different than our own; his creativity was drawn from this place. But it was also a creativity linked with a deep ethic of work, where he focused on ensuring that his art was as perfect as possible. And left unstated in the article is one of the real testaments to his work: he would re- edit episodes, years after they had first been produced, when he found there were elements he was unhappy with or that no longer adequately represented what he had learned was a more right way of thinking about things. Also left unwritten in this piece was Fred’s belief that children we resilient and could be taught about the world; his shows dealt with issues like the Vietnam war and nuclear war in ways that were approachable to children who deserved to be involved in understanding their world, and always knowing they weren’t alone in it, and that it was perfectly ok to have feelings about it.
  • New York and Boston Pigeons Don’t Mix // The sheer size of pigeon populations–they extent across vast swathes of urbanized (and road connected) land–is pretty amazing. But, equally interesting, is how rural environments seem to, effectively, segregate populations from one another. It’s just another example of how genetically diverse groups can exist all around us, without our ever realizing the distinctiveness.

Cool Things

  • I Miss the Office // If you want office sounds for your work at home, then this site has you covered. (Also, if this is what you’re missing you’re kinda weird!)
  • How to Make Whipped Coffee // I am very curious to try and make this at some point in the future!
  • The Slow Fade of City Life // When the last two images are accurate, you know it’s a lot easier to get through the lack of the city.
  • Campari and Orange Juice // I have to say, this is my new favourite brunch drink. It tastes almost like grapefruit juice, though the real secret—not in this recipe—is to aerate the Campari and OJ in a blender before mixing in a cocktail shaker. The aeration really opens up the Campari and gives the whole drink a level of creaminess it otherwise wouldn’t have.
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Quotations

On the Relationship Between Knowledge and Power

… surely there is no automatic, positive link between knowledge and power, especially if that means power in a social or political sense. At times knowledge brings merely an enlightened impotence or paralysis. One may know exactly what to do but lack the wherewithal to act. Of the many conditions that affect the phenomenon of power, knowledge is but one and by no means the most important.

Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
Categories
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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Links

The London Tube Is Tracking Riders with Their Phones

From Wired:

An agency like TfL could also use uber-accurate tracking data to send out real-time service updates. “If no passengers are using a particular stairway, it could alert TfL that there’s something wrong with the stairway—a missing step or a scary person,” Kaufman says. (Send emergency services stat.)

The Underground won’t exactly know what it can do with this data until it starts crunching the numbers. That will take a few months. Meanwhile, TfL has set about quelling a mini-privacy panic—if riders don’t want to share data with the agency, Sager Weinstein recommends shutting off your mobile device’s Wi-Fi.

So, on the one hand, they’ll apply norms and biases to ascertain why their data ‘says’ certain things. But to draw these conclusion the London transit authority will collect information from customers and the only way to disable this collection is to reduce the functionality of your device when you’re in a public space. Sounds like a recipe for great consensual collection of data and subsequent data ‘analysis’.

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Links

Turkey coup plotters’ use of ‘amateur’ app helped unveil their network

The Guardian:

A senior Turkish official said Turkish intelligence cracked the app earlier this year and was able to use it to trace tens of thousands of members of a religious movement the government blames for last month’s failed coup.

Members of the group stopped using the app several months ago after realising it had been compromised, but it still made it easier to swiftly purge tens of thousands of teachers, police, soldiers and justice officials in the wake of the coup.

…

Starting in May 2015, Turkey’s intelligence agency was able to identify close to 40,000 undercover Gülenist operatives, including 600 ranking military personnel, by mapping connections between ByLock users, the Turkish official said.

However, the Turkish official said that while ByLock helped the intelligence agency identify Gülen’s wider network, it was not used for planning the coup itself. Once Gülen network members realised ByLock had been compromised they stopped using it, the official said.

But intelligence services are policing agencies are still ‘Going Dark’…

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Links

Why wearable fitness trackers offer no weight-loss ‘advantage’

CBC:

Both groups had significant improvements in body composition, fitness, physical activity and diet, with no significant difference between groups, they said.

In total, 75 per cent of participants completed the study.

Estimated average weights for the group wearing trackers were 212 pounds at study entry and 205 pounds at 24 months, resulting in an average weight loss of about 7.7 pounds.

In comparison, those in the website group started out at 210 pounds when the study began and weighed in at 197 pounds at 24 months, for an average loss of 13 pounds.

Still, Jakicic said in an email: “We should not send the message that these wearable technologies do not help with weight loss — there were some in our study for whom it made a difference.

I would argue that the ‘advantage’ that the trackers offer is to motivate people who otherwise might be less mindful on a regular basis to increase their daily activity. The headline of the article directly contradicts the point made by the study’s author: that the message should not be that wearables do not help with weight loss.

Perhaps one of the broader issues is that weight loss is predominantly associated with dietary changes. Fitness trackers focus on activity. As such, meeting fitness tracker goals (absent food monitoring) can lead to reduced weight losses as compared to those engaged in more comprehensive health and diet tracking.