technology

Ugh. I hate the new Facebook. I liked it better without the massive psychological experiments.

Facebook experimented on us in a way that we really didn’t like. Its important to frame it that way because, as Jenny Davis pointed out earlier this week, they experiment on us all the time and in much more invasive ways. The ever-changing affordances of Facebook are a relatively large intervention in the lives of millions of people and yet the outrage over these undemocratic changes never really go beyond a complaint about the new font or the increased visibility of your favorite movies (mine have been and always will be True Stories and Die Hard). To date no organization, as Zeynep Tufekci observed, has had the “stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.” When we do get mad at Facebook, it always seems to be a matter of unintended consequences or unavoidable external forces: There was justified outrage over changes in privacy settings that initiated unwanted context collapse, and we didn’t like the hard truth that Facebook had been releasing its data to governments. Until this week, it was never quite so clear just how much unchecked power Facebook has over its 1.01 billion monthly active users. What would governing such a massive sociotechnical system even look like? more...

Last week Brendan Eich, the newly appointed CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, had to step down amid backlash from his fellow board members, Silicon Valley elites, and the public at large for his $1,000 donation to supporters of California’s Prop 8 anti-marriage equality bill. In the grand scheme of things, a $1000 contribution from a guy that is I-invented-JavaScript-wealthy to a $38.7 million campaign, probably didn’t change much. But the headlines were never about Eich secretly bankrolling Prop 8; it’s been about what kind of person should be allowed to lead the best-known open-source organization that makes the third-most-installed browser on the planet.

There’s lots of people who say that even if you disagree with Eich, this shouldn’t be grounds for him to step down because his beliefs have no bearing on how you build a browser. I deeply disagree, and it isn’t a matter of ideological opposition, but of observable fact: technology always has a bit of its creator in it and technology is never politically neutral. Moreover, I don’t think, as many have claimed, that Eich’s departure was a failure of democracy. In fact I see it as a leading indicator for the free software community’s maturing legal and political knowledge. more...

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“sites that rely heavily on simple voting have much higher percentages of male users”

“an ideology that sees every person as a potential threat & every communication as potentially worth surveilling”

“How does someone that with an obvious resentment for the social sciences, also make a joke about how we were always already alienated?”

“ViralNova does not exist. Those who speak of ViralNova miss the point of ViralNova”

“the gruff man taking drags from the e-cigarette may also have conceivably traversed the space-time continuum“ more...

Computer Virus TV News Report 1988

“a prior exposure on Facebook will lead to increased arousal during a face-to-face encounter”

“we have to build the community as an online audience and hold it together by performing for it perpetually”

“I cursed the gendered nature of tech design that has written out women from the group of legitimate users”

“The billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events and began meditating just over a year ago”

“The cruel trick is that “the internet sucks” is a self-fulfilling prophecy”

“everyone who has ever masturbated understands the limitations of the [openness] paradigm”

“misogyny doesn’t come from the internet, it comes from contemporary culture. It won’t be fixed by the internet & it wont be fixed by women”

“seeing yourself do something to make yourself become something“ more...

“Franzen’s 6,400-word piece in The Guardian may be the last cry of the last dinosaur going down for the last time in the tar pit”

“the Internet is where we live. It’s not a place we go to anymore; it’s a layer over everything”

“Unsolved Mysteries injected a sense of the enchanted in an otherwise mundane suburban landscape”

“the tools used to make film, the science of it, are not racially neutral”

“why must a photo of my face be justified when a photo of my bookshelf is not?”

“selfies suggest the world we observe through social media is more interesting when people insert themselves into it”

“Week 5: Feedback: Bruno Latour comments on your blogs”

“the “government as a platform” agenda assumes that private industry is the best way of delivering public services”

“The problem with the relentless “search for meaning” is that it extinguishes all meaning in favour of pure emotion”

“the Internet is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

“The drone is a sonic paradigm grounded in neoliberal values and conventions”

“Blurring the lines between machine and organic humanity, Haraway-like, shows that those lines are in fact blurrable”

“Replicants are obsessed with photographs”

“the visual regime of the drone, its will to omniscience and precision”

“A Predator drone stays aloft for 18hrs & the pilots were pushed to be as tireless as the technology they controlled”

“they had not yet grown comfortable playing themselves before the camera”

“Soft Culture is hard for some to look at”

“a grocery shelf that comes equipped with sensors to determine the age and sex of passing customers”

“Tinder feels like a stopgap solution”

“the question of whether or not something is digital is no longer really important”

“Apple announcements are the opposite of a guilty pleasure; they are a burden that I take on with pride”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

“Raw video of the quadcopter drone flight and crash on the streets of Manhattan”

“you cannot take a picture without involving an act of selfishness”

“The anxiety some people feel over the mass advent of digital is not unreasonable but their response to it often is”

“the Bluetooth RoboRoach, the first cyborg to be commercially available to the general public”

“TV has gotten a lot more intimate, more entwined with our subconscious, closer”

“Facebook’s temporal orientation puts undue pressure on its users to conform to its system“ more...

“damn girl are you horse_ebooks because so many dudes got upset when they found out that you are a real human being”

“the Horse e-books fiasco suggests that we are more than ready to mistake bots for humans and vice versa”

“Why is it so much easier to blame Facebook than look at the misogyny & hatred it reflects?”

“the ipad pathetically asks: “Do you still think I’m pretty?”, shifting the gendered allusions into full culmination“ more...

“The fact that the Supreme Court itself has links to its own Web site that no longer function shows the depth of the link rot problem”

“In some circles, being inaccessible is a status symbol”

“the intention behind the looking matters the most”

“clothing that does not move, rigid materials that force a body into an idealized appearance”

“romance was alive and well in the Instagram iteration of their marriage”

““That’s boring,” thought BuzzFeed, deciding to place photographs of five nipples above that explanation”

“Guys who try to hit on you by asking if you want to try on their Google Glass”

“Jesse Pinkman’s Roomba Starting bid: $200“ more...

“‘Like’ Is Protected Speech, Appeals Court Says”

“Since the promise of money is broken, far out of reach, young people’s currency is attention”

“The imagined traces of my would-be scrobbling seemed like photographs for sound: scrobble, or it didn’t happen”

“The organisms are probably not alive, but, excitingly, probably do contain DNA”

““Work” trains us to pay special attention to tempo, and this habit follows us into our leisure time”

“Social media, of course, is both a mirror and an audience at once”

“War on Instagram: Framing conflict photojournalism with mobile photography apps”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...