Christmas weeknotes
Starting with random technology things:
The launch of the open source Autoware Foundation (thanks to Trucks newsletter)
Robotic tiles for virtual reality experiences — solving a problem I’ve wondered about :)
Occasionally there’s something interesting in Stratechery, although it sometimes feels like the (paid subscriber) newsletter needs careful parsing to remember what particular world view it represents. Just before Christmas it covered Discord, which I’ve used for game chat a handful of times, but which is far more:
The rise of Discord — which was valued at $1.65 billion last April — reflects something very fundamental about gaming that I suspect is missed by many: for young people in particular gaming is a social experience.
The social nature of much gaming certainly isn’t a revelation for me, although that valuation is :)
The real value of 150 million users, though, is as a distribution channel, which is where the Discord Store makes so much sense: if you have an app that 150 million people are opening regularly, why not put a storefront there?
I opened Discord earlier, and didn’t spot the store without looking for it. It seemed to be featuring a violent “school attack” game, which was pretty offputting (especially without the usual (eg Steam) content warning click-through), not to mention badly targeted. So maybe that “why not” question could have spurred some more thought.
I’ve had a laptop camera cover for a long time now, and have pondered the absence of microphone equivalents; thanks to Techcrunch I now know there is one — more active than the camera protection.
Technology Review has a feature on Shenzhen, with lots of interesting information about how the electronics/tech manufacturing systems there operate. I’ve seen quite a few people link to this over the last couple of weeks and everyone focuses on a different aspect — the commoditisation, the IP, the engagement of entrepreneurs from countries like Ghana. There’s obviously a responsible tech angle, both in terms of sustainability of making so much tat, and around the software side (I wouldn’t look to these products for security, safety or longevity). There’s the threat of a rising middle class to the grey market labour Shenzhen relies upon, and the recent demise in the region of the much-hyped maker movement (eclipsed in utility by business operations expertise, as far as I can tell). The challenge of building connected products in this context, as China’s restricted and local-centric internet diverges from the essential marketing and finance tools available elsewhere, is also interesting.
I also found this 2017 article on where things are from, or marked as being from, and their historical associations and their current relevance (or lack of relevance, given complex supply chains).
Kickstarter now makes it easier for product creators to indicate their sustainability credentials, and also offers tips about how to design for sustainability, such as repairability.
Since 2009, 154,000 projects have been funded through Kickstarter.
On to the interactions between humans and computers.
I still remember my earliest user-centric design training with Nielsen Norman Group, perhaps 12 years ago now. They’ve just published a study into whether users can control and understand interfaces which are driven by machine learning. Computer systems can often be hard to understand and build a mental model for, and machine learning makes this even more opaque. The six recommendations for user experience design are really good — I wish more of the systems I use regularly followed these (hello, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn…).
Silicon Valley isn’t the only place with an aggressive tech business culture. The Irish Times(!) describes how Huawei operates.
Amazon is critical infrastructure for a lot of businesses, large and small, both as a logistics system and as a compute platform. We often forget this when we think simply of the boxes finding their way to our homes. The Verge has a detailed investigation into the startling complexity of the scams hitting small sellers on Amazon; you don’t have a meaningful right of appeal by default in a private market like this.
Near Future Laboratory kindly sent me a reminder that they still exist, with a note about their Mobile Ordinary Gestures publication — studies of the body language of mobile phone users. Their TBDCatalog is an all-too-rare example of a more questioning attitude to a connected world. If you enjoyed Private Eye’s 2018 Christmas gift guide, you’ll love the Catalog.
Douglas Rushkoff blogs about the anti-human religion of Silicon Valley. I’m looking forward to Rushkoff’s new book, Team Human, in 2019. (In other book news, Purpose have produced a whole book on steward ownership and new financing models.
I’ve been noodling about how we measure stuff, and other people have been writing books about targets and metrics. Stefan Collini reviews some in LRB:
It is commonly observed that the rise of metrics is an expression of, and a response to, a decline in trust. That there has been a marked decline in some of the traditional forms of social trust over the past couple of generations is undeniable, but the dominant contemporary version of ‘accountability’ rests on something more deep-seated and visceral than even that. It has become the vehicle for a suspicion of, and hostility towards, professions on the part of those who suspect that members of the professions have a nicer life than they do. It may be nicer because there are thought to be more intrinsic rewards to the work such professionals do; it may be because they have more autonomy in their working lives; it may be because they were historically accorded more respect; and it may be that their salaries and benefits were greater or at least more secure. But just as Nietzsche analysed the imposition of morality on the strong by the weak as an expression of ressentiment or a form of revenge, so metrics — the moral code of a sourly reductive managerial culture — are the means to make sure that professionals’ working conditions should more and more correspond to the alienated, insecure, hollowed-out working conditions of so many other members of society.
and
Spreadsheet capitalism is much more effective than old-style ruling class repression, not least because it pulls off the conjuring trick of seeming to give priority to individual agency while in fact subordinating everyone to supposedly impersonal market forces. At bottom, performance metrics operate through a culture of fear, but one in which the arbitrary whim of a lord or master has been replaced with the terrifying implacability of a row of figures.
And this is before we automate all the decision-making.
We’ve had 20-odd years of figuring out how to do internet services for people, and we haven’t done a good job of it. We measure the wrong things, and even if they were the right things, we fake them and defraud each other. Last week saw a nice Twitter thread summarising some of the issues with common web / app metrics.
Just today, John Thornhill in the FT covers similar ground about inappropriate metrics. Apparently Ghent University is giving up on publication and citation metrics as a way to allocate funding, looking instead at collaboration rather than ranking individuals. Thornhill also notes that
there is a significant difference between Big Data and strong data
in terms of decision-making.
Deb Chachra’s 2015 newsletter discussed clothing semiotics. I ended up reading it (again? maybe?) and it still resonates. Perhaps more than usual during the Christmas work party season.
In this fantastic interview for Rawr Denim, William Gibson talks about clothing and fashion: “There’s an idea called “gray man”, in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. …[T]here’s something appealingly “low-drag” about gray man theory: reduced friction with one’s environment.” That made me wonder: “What does a ‘grey woman’ look like?”, which made me think about how Deborah Tannen used the linguistics terms marked and unmarked to describe gender and clothing. Just as many English words are default male (unmarked), with a changed ending to connote female (marked; think ‘actor’ vs ‘actress’), she argued that men’s dress can be unmarked but women’s dress is always marked. That is, there are decisions that men make about what they wear that are defaults, that aren’t even seen as a decision. In contrast, every decision that a woman makes about what she wears — heels vs, flats, pants vs, skirts, the length of a skirt and the height of a neckline, haircuts, jewelry — is freighted with cultural baggage. Take makeup. Especially in professional settings, for a woman, not wearing makeup is a noticeable, and notable, decision: marked. But for a man, not wearing makeup is not a decision — nobody notices when men aren’t wearing makeup: unmarked. (Of course, a man wearing makeup is very marked indeed.)
I enjoyed this Spectator article about how different gestures are used around the world, and the potential for confusion and problems when used in the wrong places.
You’re supposed to use pictures on posts these days. Here’s an unexpected Christmas visitor:
