I donât know. I must have gotten up in a bad mood or something. This is to announce the colour of this issue đ. These are a few thoughts and are certainly not fully thought out, but I thought Iâd put them out there for discussion anyway. đ¤ˇââď¸
Thereâs something seriously wrong with Big Tech at the moment. From the proclamations of Mark Zuckerberg (the laughably pathetic Julius Caesar cosplayer) that he no longer should care what he says and does to something like half of the worldâs population through his privacy-ignoring âsocialâ media project to Eric Schmidtâs declaration that climate change is bad, but a parlour-game guess-the-next-word text generator will solve it, to Sam Altmanâs insistence that his particular brand of LLM is going to âsolve all physicsâ, not that he knows anything about physics of course, and who couldnât ignore Elon Muskâs Ketamine-fueled descent into fascism and continual abject stupidity.
I could go on more, but itâs just too depressing to hear these people talk this way, with absolutely no responsibility and absolutely no pushback from the media or the business world. Theyâre held up as âgeniusesâ or âbusiness gurusâ, but they have collectively enabled vast wealth-extraction machines that they are the sole beneficiaries of, marketing poor-quality products and services in most cases.
Iâve been trying to understand why this is happening now and why it didnât happen before in earlier periods of tech. I have no evidence, but I have experience and a bit of spidey-sense, for what it is worth.
I think it just boils down to the fact that previously tech was confined to silos of some areas and departments of business and a bit of exposure to the general public, where some services were made available, and a few things were made easier. That is no longer the case. Tech has butted up against the real hard stuff of the social makeup, empathy, perception, knowledge and the general humanity of the world. It is now confronted with that hard wall of governments and societies, with their inherent incomprehensible complexity. Throwing logic gates at that scale of the problem (if this, then that) just doesnât work anymore. The fact is that exceptions are the rule, and the basics are the exception. Virtually everything we do in life is a massively complex set of operations that sometimes follows logic but mostly doesnât. And Intel or ARM processors with a stack of OS and software piled on top of them are just not enough to work this stuff out. It canât, and it most likely never will.
When the tech was being democratised and available to the public through sites like the Amazon bookseller of the time, it was simple. Books were listed on a webpage, and you could purchase one with a simple click, paying with your bank/credit card details. A few days later, the book (a physical thing) was shipped and in your hands. That was it. The only amazing thing about it at the time was that the catalogue was immense and bigger than any physical bookstore. Due to how databases work, you could easily and quickly add a new book for sale. This was used to continuously evolve the catalogue from the distributorâs and publisherâs lists of titles and the requests users made when searching for a book by title, author or ISBN. If the book wasnât in the catalogue and appeared in the search history of the site frequently, a couple of clicks later, it would become available.
It ended up mostly killing bookshops. Niche shops exist, but the industry of buying and selling books has changed forever. Digital distribution didnât help, of course, but it was the online sales methodology that killed bookstores.
But I digress.
Today, technology is immersed in virtually every aspect of our lives, but it is no longer a benevolent force for the most part when looking at the most popular platforms in use around the world. And I think this results from tech becoming more dehumanising, reducing us all to units of MAUs, ASPs, CSATs and other ultimately useless indicators (KPIs, if you will).
I also think that this will not last. And I think there will be some kind of reset, but I donât know when or what that will look like. But if history is anything to go by, I donât think it will be done through negotiations around a table of stakeholders calmly negotiating on what we all want for the best. There are too many stakeholders and too many diverging opinions that something will have to give. I donât look forward to the future of tech as it intrudes on my/our personal space and encroaches on my/our private life, following me everywhere like a vile little stalker. Did you get a robot vacuum cleaner? Great, now that maker has floor plans of your home, as well as video and sound recordings (possibly) of the most private conversations. It has sold them to advertising companies with little to no scruples about what these other businesses will do with that data. They have also sold that data to the police so that when they come knocking on your door for that benign transgression of taking off a micro-second before the green light at the late-night deserted crossroads, theyâll know where to shoot first because youâll likely be in the bedroom or the living that has been pre-identified by the crappy dust mover, replete with information on all the furniture in the room. (Think this isnât feasible? Letâs talk.)
This will not end well.
I mentioned about the Social Web. A term Iâm happy with using, but there has been some development in that area. A foundation has been set up, but unfortunately, it is cohabited by undesirable companies such as Meta. If you want to know what is happening, Iâll let you search and look for yourselves. Still, I am of the opinion that it is incredibly naive to believe that Meta has good intentions in their participation. I believe that they will do whatever they can to destroy Mastodon as it stands as a platform today (no advertising and no useless engagement algorithms) and the decentralised social media sphere for their own gain at the expense of the world at the slightest hint of danger to their surveillance operation. Their participation will be nothing more than an embrace, extend, and extinguish policy popularised by Microsoft a couple of decades ago.
Contrary to what you might think my position is, I do feel Meta should have a seat at the table, but it is clear to me that their inclusion should be restrained precisely because they are the single biggest player on the Internet. They wield too much power and power beyond anything that a small piss-pot association or foundation can have. As such, they absolutely will use it if they feel the slightest bit threatened. Anything they do or say should be scrutinised, and they should have absolutely no power to push through any decision unilaterally. One seat, one vote, and not an iota more.
Reading
Here is a quick list of the things that caught my attention this week:
Think your small Caribbean island is not a target for cybersecurity attacks? Think Again. The Barbados Revenue Authority had 230GB of data exfiltrated, and it was put up for sale on the Internet. Theories are being bandied around, but I donât think it is helpful to discuss that here.
The Walrus has a good article expressing and discussing the way facial recognition technology is not fit for purpose. It opens with this line:
THE FIRST TIME Karl Ricanek was stopped by police for âdriving while Blackâ was in the summer of 1995.
Another article from the same publication does a good job of expressing some of what Iâm thinking about social networks in an article entitled, The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age.
I hope you had a great week, and I wish you an excellent week ahead.
