Dr Laura James's writings

Or nearly a decade in phones, as this is missing the two most recent phones: I had the Vodafone from 2009, so started the decade with that. The little joystick thing was good, but otherwise it was an annoying phone after 3 Nokias with physical keypads. The two HTCs were better. The Fairphone 1 was shortlived and aged rapidly (at least with my level of app usage); I was delighted to replace it with the Fairphone 2, which weathered changes in Android much better. I did have a second FP2 handset, after the first one hit early adopter bugs and needed to go back for debugging. Overall it was nearly 4 years before I changed phone again. My FP2 is not shown, as it went back for refurbishment; I now have a Fairphone 3, which is a really excellent piece of hardware, recommended. We'll see if it lasts the seven years Fairphone hope to support it for! All these phones had/have very similar user interfaces - a portrait rectangle screen you poke at (or swipe, these days), icons, apps...

A recent edition of the Kneeling Bus looks at the void left behind when products and services cease to be. Blockbuster went away, but was replaced by Netflix etc, arguably improvements. Spotify has replaced CDs, and many people don't have them any more. If/when Spotify goes away, will there be something better? Several people linked to this New Republic article on the internet and climate change . A good mix of necessary responses (resilient local mesh networks for times when extreme weather damage conventional infrastructure), and thought-provoking stats - streaming "one hour of Netflix a week requires more electricity, annually, than the yearly output of two new refrigerators." We’ve grown used to communicating in videos, memes, and animation. Most websites are packed with video players, blaring banner ads, pop-ups, elaborate layouts. But the glut of data costs actual energy. And do we actually need any of it? “Streaming could easily be 10 percent of global electri...

Maybe we've had the wrong visions of the future, argues Max Read . What if we aren’t being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past?  This article covers bewitched 'smart' objects and the feudalism of big tech platforms: Looking around lately, I am reminded less often of Gibson’s cyberpunk future than of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical past, less of technology and cybernetics than of magic and apocalypse. The internet doesn’t seem to be turning us into sophisticated cyborgs so much as crude medieval peasants entranced by an ever-present realm of spirits and captive to distant autocratic landlords. What if we aren’t being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past? The article gives many examples, such as: And as the internet bewitches more everyday objects — smart TVs, smart ovens, smart speakers, smart vibrators — its feudal logic will seize the material world as well. Yo...

A lot of notes this week fortnight month, but stick with them. There's a comic at the end.  Tech miscellany to start with.  We need to communicate better about technology. Ronald Dworkin breaks down issues with how we describe AI : To keep people in the small world from behaving more ridiculously, or from experiencing more loneliness than they already do, and to head off a potential conflict of religious proportions, we must tell AI’s inventors to set the right tone. No more confusing the passive with the active. Such careful language was unnecessary in the past. People could get away with being lazy and sloppy, and saying that an ocean wave “causes” events. No longer. With the rise of AI, we must be more precise. We must declare AI a bunch of silicon and metal, with no more power to “cause” than an ocean wave. This piece about AI and radiology , how the technology actually works today and what it needs to be capable of to be useful, is accessible and clear. T hree ...

Maintainers III started with a joint keynote. Taeyoon Choi spoke eloquently about many topics.  Much of his talk discussed technology, which I'll cover in a separate post. Taeyoon quoted a great talk by Nabil Hassein in 2018, on computing, climate and all our relationships - definitely worth looking up.  He proposed that we needed a new frame for much of our work and thinking: distribution not decentralisation care instead of control information instead of data How do you know when something is infrastructure? If there's someone on call at 3am to fix it when it breaks, it's infrastructure. Things that are luxuries gradually become services you can pay for, which become utilities (which you can build systems on top of), and eventually something which is a right. For instance, GPS is becoming a utility; a recent US act makes electricity a right (for Americans, not having power is a political thing, which is why hurricanes taking out power is a big deal). But whethe...

Labour was a theme cutting across sessions at Maintainers III. There was one specific session exploring it, which turned out to be quite data-driven (but also US-specific).  Data about labour is often missing, for various reasons. Half the workers in the US are paid by the hour, so their overall wage is unknown and with unpredictable work schedules statistics struggle to paint a realistic picture. Many people have two or three or more jobs; perhaps 40% have some sort of 'side hustle'.  Some forms of intangible labour, such as that of graduate students in universities, are hard to track (that's on top of the unpaid labour in care, in the home and so on). This is perhaps unsurprising given people are generally happy not to know about the poverty and precarity of others. Quite a few sessions discussed unions and labour organising, including mention of the Tech Worker Coalition as well as more traditional unionisation. In the US, collective bargaining was developed in a w...