"The Modern Point of View and the New Order"
December 16, 2020 2:35 AM Subscribe
What comes after smartphones? - "We've spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we've only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them."
There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.also btw...
- Social Networking 2.0 - "Having one identity is a core principle for Facebook, which is great for advertising if nothing else, but at odds with the desire of many to be different parts of themselves to different people in different contexts... the role for [fb and twitter] will be as a bridge between attention-focused products on one side, and private interest-defined trusted groups on the other."[1,2,3]
- [cw transphobia, whorephobia] OnlyFans, but for Everything - "People will work to meet imagined demand. Create state-sponsored bots that open Substack newsletters, tip the OnlyFans pornographers, download the podcasts, click all the things. Did you know that 71% of ad impressions are served to bots?"[4,5,6]
Prescient in recognizing the interconnectedness of individual fates within a country rapidly becoming a single industrial whole, he was unremittingly hostile to reform with any shade of “paternalism”—especially from the state. Living through economic convulsion and class conflict unlike any other in U.S. history, he often preferred to retreat into the long view of an evolutionary perspective that reduced the present to a little speck in the passage of millennia...The Vested Interests and the Common Man (pdf) - "The aim of these papers is to show how and, as far as may be, why a discrepancy has arisen in the course of time between those accepted principles of law and custom that underlie business enterprise and the businesslike management of industry, on the one hand, and the material conditions which have now been engendered by that new order of industry that took its rise in the late 18th century, on the other hand; together with some speculations on the civil and political difficulties set afoot by this discrepancy between business and industry."
Born in 1857 to a close-knit Norwegian family in Cato, Wisconsin, Veblen moved as a child to Rice County, Minnesota, as his parents steadily pushed further west to escape the advancing frontier of capitalist integration... The leisure class, in other words, was just a dressed-up, modern twist on earlier forms of ruling-class plunder, swapping out chainmail for straw hats and linen suits...
Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise, less well known but equally powerful, extended this argument to the then-novel corporate structure of the business firm itself. Proceeding from a division between “industrial employments” (scientists, engineers, skilled mechanics, or farmers, for instance) and “pecuniary employments” (business managers, entrepreneurs, bankers, stockbrokers, real estate agents), Veblen argued that the storied separation of “ownership” and “management” in the modern corporate form had put pecuniary interests firmly in the driving seat. Channeling, for once directly, the plaintive appeals of workers’ movements, Veblen asked rhetorically:Why do we, now and again, have hard times and unemployment in the midst of excellent resources, high efficiency and plenty of unmet wants? Why is one-half our consumable product contrived for consumption that yields no material benefit? . . . . Why are large and increasing portions of the community penniless in spite of a scale of remuneration which is very appreciably above the subsistence minimum?His answer—once again in contrast to Clark’s productivity theory—was that large profits in a closely integrated industrial economy were primarily earned through “pecuniary transactions” amid times rapid oscillations of boom and bust. Thus “it is, in great part, through or by force of [such] fluctuations . . . that large accumulations of wealth are made.” But “insofar as the gains of these unproductive occupations are of a substantial character, they come out of the aggregate product of other occupations,” that is, from the value-adding “industrial employments” themselves. Ultimately, then, “business” itself had become parasitic on “industry.” The “competitive management of industry becomes incompatible with continued prosperity so soon as the machine process has been developed to its fuller efficiency” and indeed, “further technological advance” would only “act to heighten the impracticability of competitive business.” The modern corporation, in other words, was already an archaic fetter on the full promise of technologically driven prosperity...
Above all, Veblen captured the excesses and inefficiencies that “vested interests” impose on capitalist production, as he put it in a powerful collection of essays published in 1919.
The grounds of his critique of waste were moral, but in our time—when every additional ton of carbon emitted imperils the future—it is a matter of survival. Within mainstream economics today, the most radical critiques of the present amount to modest concessions that contemporary markets can lead to “inequitable” compensation, “inefficient” work-life conflicts, or regional imbalances of investment. Veblen had no such inhibitions. “Is it safe, or sane,” he once wrote, “to go into the future by the light of these same established canons . . . that so have been tried and found wanting?”
Ownership now has virtually lost this essential part of its ordinary functions. It has taken the shape of an absentee ownership of anonymous corporate capital, and in the ordinary management of this corporate capital the greater proportion of the owners have no voice. This impersonal corporate capital, which is taking the place of the personal employer-owner of earlier times, is the outcome of a mutation of the scheme of things in business enterprise, scarcely less profound than the change which has overtaken the material equipment in the shift from handicraft methods to the machine technology...The Moral Duty of Uplift (in David Brin's Sense) - "As a believer in gods, I think there should be more gods in the world. Uplift is a way to foster more gods within, more gods between (including from the interactions between species) and, in all probability, more possibilities for gods ahead."
Industry is a matter of tangible performance in the way of producing goods and services. And in this connection it is well to recall that a vested interest is a prescriptive right to get something for nothing. Now, any project of reconstruction, the scope and method of which are governed by considerations of tangible performance, is likely to allow only a subsidiary consideration or something less to the legitimate claims of the vested interests, whether they are vested interests of business or of privilege...
Reconstruction which partakes of this character in any sensible degree will necessarily be viewed with the liveliest apprehension by the gentlemanly statesmen of the old school, by the kept classes, and by the captains of finance. It will be deplored as a subversion of the economic order, a destruction of the country's wealth, a disorganisation of industry, and a sure way to poverty, bloodshed, and pestilence. In point of fact, of course, what such a project may be counted on to subvert is that dominion of ownership by which the vested interests control and retard the rate and volume of production. The destruction of wealth in such a case will touch, directly, only the value of the securities, not the material objects to which these securities have given title of ownership; it would be a disallowance of ownership, not a destruction of useful goods. Nor need any disorganisation or disability of productive industry follow from such a move; indeed, the apprehended cancelment of the claims to income covered by negotiable securities would by that much cancel the fixed overhead charges resting on industrial enterprise, and so further production by that much. But for those persons and classes whose keep is drawn from prescriptive rights of ownership or of privilege the consequences of such a shifting of ground from vested interest to tangible performance would doubtless be deplorable. In short, “Bolshevism is a menace”; and the wayfaring man out of Armenia will be likely to ask: A menace to whom?
[...]
In other words, it has come to pass with the change of circumstances that the rule of Live and Let Live now waits on the discretion of the owners of large wealth... business controls industry. Invested wealth in large holdings controls the country's industrial system, directly by ownership of the plant, as in the mechanical industries, or indirectly through the market, as in farming. So that the population of these civilised countries now falls into two main classes: those who own wealth invested in large holdings and who thereby control the conditions of life for the rest; and those who do not own wealth in sufficiently large holdings, and whose conditions of life are therefore controlled by these others.
bn people have a smartphone today and there are only 5.7bn adults on earth. We can’t unlock a radically bigger market on that axis - we’ve run out of people
...I mean isn't the natural progression just implants? Ie, you merge the phone with the people? That'll certainly allow continued GDP growth for at least another decade, right?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:12 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
...I mean isn't the natural progression just implants? Ie, you merge the phone with the people? That'll certainly allow continued GDP growth for at least another decade, right?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:12 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
/me Opens post about smartphones to find that it's really about Thorstein Veblen.
Nicely played.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:19 AM on December 16, 2020 [17 favorites]
Nicely played.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:19 AM on December 16, 2020 [17 favorites]
I mean isn't the natural progression just implants? Ie, you merge the phone with the people?
Assuming that's not satire also — the natural progression of technology is never a linear step in the direction of the next "logical" thing. Trains to planes was not linear progress. Airplanes to consumer space travel was widely expected after Sputnik but did not happen. Cars to flying cars was widely assumed but did not happen. Wired landline audio phones to wired video phones was widely assumed (see 2001 A Space Odyssey for example), but did not happen before detouring through wireless phones and smartphones (which are mostly not phones at all). Labor-saving home appliances were expected to lead to domestic robots, but that didn't happen.
So I think that Ben Evans is right that the next big things will not be linear development based on the smartphone, but innovations around smartphones and other current technology. Working from anywhere, enormously accelerated by the pandemic, will be the basis of a lot of this. We're only just scratching the surface of that, and we'll look back on Zoom in 2020 the way we look back at Model Ts and Compaq's "luggable" computers. Along with working from anywhere will be shopping from anywhere, healthcare from anywhere, cultural experiences from anywhere. Maybe not so much sex from anywhere, but then again, OnlyFans is already here. What comes next will certainly be hugely about disintermediation replacing aggregation. And, it will be about trust and authentication, without which none of this will work in the long run.
posted by beagle at 6:48 AM on December 16, 2020 [19 favorites]
Assuming that's not satire also — the natural progression of technology is never a linear step in the direction of the next "logical" thing. Trains to planes was not linear progress. Airplanes to consumer space travel was widely expected after Sputnik but did not happen. Cars to flying cars was widely assumed but did not happen. Wired landline audio phones to wired video phones was widely assumed (see 2001 A Space Odyssey for example), but did not happen before detouring through wireless phones and smartphones (which are mostly not phones at all). Labor-saving home appliances were expected to lead to domestic robots, but that didn't happen.
So I think that Ben Evans is right that the next big things will not be linear development based on the smartphone, but innovations around smartphones and other current technology. Working from anywhere, enormously accelerated by the pandemic, will be the basis of a lot of this. We're only just scratching the surface of that, and we'll look back on Zoom in 2020 the way we look back at Model Ts and Compaq's "luggable" computers. Along with working from anywhere will be shopping from anywhere, healthcare from anywhere, cultural experiences from anywhere. Maybe not so much sex from anywhere, but then again, OnlyFans is already here. What comes next will certainly be hugely about disintermediation replacing aggregation. And, it will be about trust and authentication, without which none of this will work in the long run.
posted by beagle at 6:48 AM on December 16, 2020 [19 favorites]
I don't disagree with his premise, but Evans is basically saying that there's nothing big and revolutionary coming because there's nothing exciting happening in the labs. This is wrong for two reasons: (1) the days of Xerox PARC and pure research are long gone, and (2) sometimes the Next Big Thing comes completely out of left field and surprises everybody, c.f. the release of the first iPhone.
I suspect he's right, and we're going to spend the next twenty years iterating on smart phones, but you literally never know when someone's going to strap a RISC processor to a bigass battery with an antenna and change everything overnight.
posted by Mayor West at 7:01 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I suspect he's right, and we're going to spend the next twenty years iterating on smart phones, but you literally never know when someone's going to strap a RISC processor to a bigass battery with an antenna and change everything overnight.
posted by Mayor West at 7:01 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
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if someone is misogynist, classist, or whorephobic, they immediately reveal those things through how they talk about onlyfans. if someone holds that sex workers are workers and that sex worker working conditions are worker working conditions, they immediately reveal that through how they talk about onlyfans.
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posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:05 AM on December 16, 2020 [44 favorites]
if someone is misogynist, classist, or whorephobic, they immediately reveal those things through how they talk about onlyfans. if someone holds that sex workers are workers and that sex worker working conditions are worker working conditions, they immediately reveal that through how they talk about onlyfans.
tech pundits of the world: discuss onlyfans more often! if you discuss onlyfans more often, we will more quickly know which tech pundits are worth listening to!
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:05 AM on December 16, 2020 [44 favorites]
I think we're starting to see smartphone-enabled development already. The "gig economy" is largely a product of smartphones' widespread deployment — something like Uber couldn't really exist any other way. (I'm trying to imagine a pre-smartphone / 1990s-era Uber, and while you can fit enough pieces together to make it plausible, it wouldn't work very well. Radio-dispatched taxis were a thing for a long time for a reason; they worked well enough up until smartphones.)
In some cases I am personally unenthusiastic with the transition from "things based around computers" to "things based around smartphones", because in some cases there were things that just worked better on a full-screen computer. (E.g. I think online dating worked better in the profile-heavy days of OKCupid than in the photo-centric days of Tinder.)
I question exactly how much more room there is to "disrupt" everything by putting it behind a colorful app and an API, though. We're already seeing businesses that just use technology to hide human exploitation, rather than actually generate economic efficiency vs. what existed prior to them. "Uber but for [whatever]" is a punchline because it's been tried so many times. I'm not sure there's enough there there to iterate on it for another 20 years. But that doesn't mean people won't try, of course.
As to iterating on the cellphone as a device itself, I do think there's some room there. There were smartphones before the iPhone, and some of them encapsulated good ideas that got blown away when the iPhone became the de facto standard form factor for phones. There's nothing Platonically ideal about the candybar touchscreen slab. I expect to see a resurgence of interest in flip-phones, physical keyboards, modular designs, maybe even "phablets" again. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a sort of oscillation between extremes in design, that we happen to just be at one end of right now.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:28 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
In some cases I am personally unenthusiastic with the transition from "things based around computers" to "things based around smartphones", because in some cases there were things that just worked better on a full-screen computer. (E.g. I think online dating worked better in the profile-heavy days of OKCupid than in the photo-centric days of Tinder.)
I question exactly how much more room there is to "disrupt" everything by putting it behind a colorful app and an API, though. We're already seeing businesses that just use technology to hide human exploitation, rather than actually generate economic efficiency vs. what existed prior to them. "Uber but for [whatever]" is a punchline because it's been tried so many times. I'm not sure there's enough there there to iterate on it for another 20 years. But that doesn't mean people won't try, of course.
As to iterating on the cellphone as a device itself, I do think there's some room there. There were smartphones before the iPhone, and some of them encapsulated good ideas that got blown away when the iPhone became the de facto standard form factor for phones. There's nothing Platonically ideal about the candybar touchscreen slab. I expect to see a resurgence of interest in flip-phones, physical keyboards, modular designs, maybe even "phablets" again. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a sort of oscillation between extremes in design, that we happen to just be at one end of right now.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:28 AM on December 16, 2020 [8 favorites]
What I'm expecting to see is the very same kind of luxury-to-apparent-absolute-necessity slide that we've seen with cars, including but not limited to the general acceptance of the same kind of tragic but apparently inevitable background rate of utterly destroyed lives. The main difference will be that it won't be bodies that phones and IoT gadgets smash and mangle but minds.
Approaching six decades as a resident of this planet I've seen a lot of damage done by the relentless pursuit of convenience at any cost. And I'm totally not a fan of the current expectation that every person everywhere is, by default, considered contactable 24x7 and that failure to respond quickly to contact attempts is generally regarded as cause for concern. I think privacy matters to human beings, possibly to an even greater extent than walking does, and I think we've already started to take the whole hive-mind thing a bit too far.
When I look back at my own 1960s-70s childhood and compare the prevailing technological, social and economic conditions with those of today, I just feel insanely lucky to have grown up when I did. Some of that will of course be the standard Get Off My Lawn nostalgia of rose-tinted memory but most of it is absolutely not. Being a kid in 2020 involves navigating sucking maelstroms of tech-imposed social complexity that I never had to deal with.
It should not be possible that a defect in Google's single-sign-on infrastructure leaves people without working home lighting. That's insanity. And it's that particular kind of insanity that's only getting worse year on year. We know so little about the internal operation of the commercial organizations we increasingly choose to give away little freedoms to, but most of us just keep on doing it and doing it and doing it, just a little more with each Must Have new always-online gewgaw.
One of the things I've already found deeply disconcerting since iPhones arrived is the absolute eagerness with which so many people have volunteered to keep a device whose functions include those of a prisoner's electronic ankle bracelet within millimetres of their own bodies at all times. And I wonder how long it will be before we start to see smart-device parallels to jaywalking laws. It doesn't take a huge stretch to imagine the act of wandering the landscape untracked becoming generally regarded as every bit as grossly irresponsible as taking a walk down the middle of a road is now.
posted by flabdablet at 7:34 AM on December 16, 2020 [43 favorites]
Approaching six decades as a resident of this planet I've seen a lot of damage done by the relentless pursuit of convenience at any cost. And I'm totally not a fan of the current expectation that every person everywhere is, by default, considered contactable 24x7 and that failure to respond quickly to contact attempts is generally regarded as cause for concern. I think privacy matters to human beings, possibly to an even greater extent than walking does, and I think we've already started to take the whole hive-mind thing a bit too far.
When I look back at my own 1960s-70s childhood and compare the prevailing technological, social and economic conditions with those of today, I just feel insanely lucky to have grown up when I did. Some of that will of course be the standard Get Off My Lawn nostalgia of rose-tinted memory but most of it is absolutely not. Being a kid in 2020 involves navigating sucking maelstroms of tech-imposed social complexity that I never had to deal with.
It should not be possible that a defect in Google's single-sign-on infrastructure leaves people without working home lighting. That's insanity. And it's that particular kind of insanity that's only getting worse year on year. We know so little about the internal operation of the commercial organizations we increasingly choose to give away little freedoms to, but most of us just keep on doing it and doing it and doing it, just a little more with each Must Have new always-online gewgaw.
One of the things I've already found deeply disconcerting since iPhones arrived is the absolute eagerness with which so many people have volunteered to keep a device whose functions include those of a prisoner's electronic ankle bracelet within millimetres of their own bodies at all times. And I wonder how long it will be before we start to see smart-device parallels to jaywalking laws. It doesn't take a huge stretch to imagine the act of wandering the landscape untracked becoming generally regarded as every bit as grossly irresponsible as taking a walk down the middle of a road is now.
posted by flabdablet at 7:34 AM on December 16, 2020 [43 favorites]
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." --- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams.
There was a time when smart folks like me believed that the Internet would usher in a new Age of Information, when Mankind would be freed from the shackles of ignorance, superstition and cultural bias. Hasn't quite worked out as expected, I'm afraid.
posted by SPrintF at 8:24 AM on December 16, 2020 [28 favorites]
There was a time when smart folks like me believed that the Internet would usher in a new Age of Information, when Mankind would be freed from the shackles of ignorance, superstition and cultural bias. Hasn't quite worked out as expected, I'm afraid.
posted by SPrintF at 8:24 AM on December 16, 2020 [28 favorites]
I've seen a lot of damage done by the relentless pursuit of convenience at any cost.
Well, yes, but at the same time that's kind of the driving force behind literally all of human history and, arguably, the whole history of life itself on Earth.
posted by aramaic at 8:33 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Well, yes, but at the same time that's kind of the driving force behind literally all of human history and, arguably, the whole history of life itself on Earth.
posted by aramaic at 8:33 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
And I wonder how long it will be before we start to see smart-device parallels to jaywalking laws. It doesn't take a huge stretch to imagine the act of wandering the landscape untracked becoming generally regarded as every bit as grossly irresponsible as taking a walk down the middle of a road is now.
With 96% of the population having some sort of mobile phone device, 81% smartphones, there's almost no need for explicit regulations, it'll just be assumed people have them and people without won't be able to access certain services without lots of extra effort. There may well be ordinances that implicitly expect people to have a smartphone-like device without making it flat out illegal not to have one, but subject to deep suspicion and scrutiny should that be the case.
As someone who doesn't have any sort of mobile phone like device, save for the rare times I actually carry my laptop around somewhere, I already experience some serious distrust or incredulity when I say I don't have a phone on me. (That is until they get to know me better and find out what a crochety old coot I am.)
posted by gusottertrout at 8:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
With 96% of the population having some sort of mobile phone device, 81% smartphones, there's almost no need for explicit regulations, it'll just be assumed people have them and people without won't be able to access certain services without lots of extra effort. There may well be ordinances that implicitly expect people to have a smartphone-like device without making it flat out illegal not to have one, but subject to deep suspicion and scrutiny should that be the case.
As someone who doesn't have any sort of mobile phone like device, save for the rare times I actually carry my laptop around somewhere, I already experience some serious distrust or incredulity when I say I don't have a phone on me. (That is until they get to know me better and find out what a crochety old coot I am.)
posted by gusottertrout at 8:40 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Well, yes, but at the same time there are good reasons why conflating an is with an ought is generally held to be unsound.
posted by flabdablet at 8:41 AM on December 16, 2020
posted by flabdablet at 8:41 AM on December 16, 2020
I've always thought of any newly-released iPhone as being basically a Veblen good.
posted by gimonca at 9:02 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by gimonca at 9:02 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
The "Onlyfans But For Everything" article makes me roll my eyes. Especially the part where it suggests pouring a lot of money into these platforms instead of distributing economic relief for C19.
Like, sure, let's implement half-assed basic income, except poured through for-profit platforms. Link it to making something, great, what about the people who are currently too low on the hierarchy of needs to be able to do that? Shit, I have a Patreon that sometimes pays my rent and I am currently making zip from it because I prefer the pay-per-thing model and have not had the energy for my current projects for most of this year. There is no need to stick multiple middlemen (platform, payment processors, ad networks, etc, all of whom want a cut) into the process of "the government gives money directly to everyone". There is no need to force everyone to Produce Something for this basic income, there is a *ton* of important work done that does not create a salable product. Raising kids isn't gonna create a newsletter or a bunch of videos.
posted by egypturnash at 9:05 AM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
Like, sure, let's implement half-assed basic income, except poured through for-profit platforms. Link it to making something, great, what about the people who are currently too low on the hierarchy of needs to be able to do that? Shit, I have a Patreon that sometimes pays my rent and I am currently making zip from it because I prefer the pay-per-thing model and have not had the energy for my current projects for most of this year. There is no need to stick multiple middlemen (platform, payment processors, ad networks, etc, all of whom want a cut) into the process of "the government gives money directly to everyone". There is no need to force everyone to Produce Something for this basic income, there is a *ton* of important work done that does not create a salable product. Raising kids isn't gonna create a newsletter or a bunch of videos.
posted by egypturnash at 9:05 AM on December 16, 2020 [10 favorites]
Back around 1977 I worked for IMSAI, the second personal computer company. At the first West Coast Computer Faire we saw the Apple II. We realized in seconds that IMSAI was doomed. And it was. I worked for Apple from 1980 to 1992. During the early part of that time going to trade shows was amazing. You would see stuff that would blow you away. But over time, as the Mac took over at Apple, and trade shows shrunk to be just Apple centric, there was always less and less to see that blew your mind. Over time I called Macworld, iPhone Case World, as almost everything was just something you stuck on your phone or computer. No minds were blown. And now thirty plus years later, phones, computers, etc. are more just like toaster ovens, commodities sold more on price than features. Yes, walking around with a computer in your pocket, wired to the outside world, is pretty significant. But for me, what is significant is just size. It’s just a bloody computer. I haven’t seen anything in years, that blew me away. Except, for VCV Rack. That’s amazing. Where are are real, amazing technological breakthroughs? Who out there is thinking differently (to steal a phrase) preparing to blow our collective minds and open up some new doors to walkthrough?
posted by njohnson23 at 9:09 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:09 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
I've always thought of any newly-released iPhone as being basically a Veblen good.
This is why they all must be easily visually distinguished from the previous version. Otherwise how will anyone know you are now on phone apotheosis version 14. The point of the latest iPhone isn't to send messages other than that you have the latest iPhone because all the previous phones sent all those other messages perfectly well (for the most part baring the antenna snafus of some very early versions).
posted by srboisvert at 9:12 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
This is why they all must be easily visually distinguished from the previous version. Otherwise how will anyone know you are now on phone apotheosis version 14. The point of the latest iPhone isn't to send messages other than that you have the latest iPhone because all the previous phones sent all those other messages perfectly well (for the most part baring the antenna snafus of some very early versions).
posted by srboisvert at 9:12 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
I worked for Apple from 1980 to 1992.
Heh, you should know Chris Espinosa still posts in chat all the time, and it's pretty easy for us short timers to really get him, and your other former teammates, going on and on about Apple in the good ol' days.
Otherwise how will anyone know you are now on phone apotheosis version 14
Well, it's iPhone 12, not 14, first of all. And, in my person opinion, RAW photos are the big feature this iteration, and no one looking can tell. Well, unless you show them your badass pictures after you process them I guess. The MagSafe charging is my second favorite feature, and no one can tell by looking for that one either.
posted by sideshow at 9:42 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
Heh, you should know Chris Espinosa still posts in chat all the time, and it's pretty easy for us short timers to really get him, and your other former teammates, going on and on about Apple in the good ol' days.
Otherwise how will anyone know you are now on phone apotheosis version 14
Well, it's iPhone 12, not 14, first of all. And, in my person opinion, RAW photos are the big feature this iteration, and no one looking can tell. Well, unless you show them your badass pictures after you process them I guess. The MagSafe charging is my second favorite feature, and no one can tell by looking for that one either.
posted by sideshow at 9:42 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
if someone is misogynist, classist, or whorephobic, they immediately reveal those things through how they talk about onlyfans.
Seriously, wtf is this? [cw transphobia, whorephobia]
What a bigoted fucking asshole.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:50 AM on December 16, 2020 [19 favorites]
Seriously, wtf is this? [cw transphobia, whorephobia]
Expecting the urban elite to do OnlyFans is like asking prep school grads to cover tuition with a ROTC assignment in combat arms.I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have no idea what this blog post is supposed to convey other than the author's various hatreds. It is almost too poorly written to be truly offensive, because I genuinely do not know what this person is trying to say, but then, occasionally: clarity.
(Just kidding, we’d rather tell young men to become women. And then they can go do porn.)
What a bigoted fucking asshole.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:50 AM on December 16, 2020 [19 favorites]
Also why post that trash on the blue? It is incoherent except in its bigotry. What is the fucking point?
posted by schadenfrau at 9:53 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by schadenfrau at 9:53 AM on December 16, 2020 [6 favorites]
And this is not...like, look, I clicked on the post because kliuless always puts together these monster posts, with a million things worth reading, arranged in such a way as to present (rather than dictate) a unique view, and I appreciate the hell out of that. Which I suppose is why reading Elaine's Idle rant was so jarring.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:08 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by schadenfrau at 10:08 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I question exactly how much more room there is to "disrupt" everything by putting it behind a colorful app and an API, though
Amazing as they are, smartphones are better at putting their users "below the API" than above it. Huxley’s alphas will still interact with a whole live other person; betas with the material world, or at least a lot more computer.
posted by clew at 10:34 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Amazing as they are, smartphones are better at putting their users "below the API" than above it. Huxley’s alphas will still interact with a whole live other person; betas with the material world, or at least a lot more computer.
posted by clew at 10:34 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
( I thought making video was becoming an exception, but then discussions of TikTok vs YouTube influencing said the latter was safer, more profitable, and relied on having a lot more videographer equipment.)
posted by clew at 10:37 AM on December 16, 2020
posted by clew at 10:37 AM on December 16, 2020
I don't disagree with his premise, but Evans is basically saying that there's nothing big and revolutionary coming because there's nothing exciting happening in the labs.
I disagree with the premise that there's nothing interesting going on in the labs. The machine learning space is doing crazy new things, and over the next N+1 years they're going to get exponentially more efficient at doing these crazy things, while also coming up with new crazy things to do, and better ways to do them.
Speech generation is an instructive example, I think. Four-ish years ago there was a massive advance in generating high-quality speech, with outputs close to indistinguishable from real human speech. The first version of this took ~20 minutes to produce 1 second of output, on high-powered servers. Now I can run the new versions of these models on a phone. Now something less expected: Descript uses these kinds of models to a) transcribe podcasts, and b) let you edit the text of the transcript, then c) generates natural-sounding edited versions of the audio incorporating your revisions. That's hella cool.
I expect we're going to get similar levels of improvement on text generation, as well as iterative improvements on including long-term guidance for text generation. So AI Dungeon becomes eventually a real game, rather than a dream simulator, and then the tech starts getting integrated into all kinds of big open-world games. Basically, procedurally generated worlds become a thousand times more interesting... Imagine walking around Night City (or whatever) and literally every NPC has their own story. Imagine having your own epic stories in Night City, based on the actual choices you made, instead of a couple tracks plotted out by the game devs.
And so on.
Meanwhile, I think we're seeing lots of payoff from ubiquitous video. Jugglers, for example, are much better on average because of the kind of sharing+learning that video enables. More seriously, Khan Academy and such are having a positive impact on kid's academics.
We tend only to notice hardware changes. Everyone got a car, then everyone got a phone. And now the phone does more and more (frankly miraculous) things, but we don't seem to care as much because there's no new piece of hardware. Another fun game to play: Estimate the amount of hardware that wasn't built in the last twenty years because the functionality had been subsumed by phones (and thus, software). Some people think that savings is actually more than enough to offset the build costs of the phones. (Relatedly: How much energy is saved by doing things on phones instead of desktop computers? Desktops plugged into a wall are power hungry; phones are designed to maximize battery life, so give a lot more compute per watt hour.) Meanwhile, we do a lot more because we don't have to buy the hardware to do it, and we are mainly doing it on energy-efficient pocket devices, which short circuits Jevon's Paradox.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:00 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
I disagree with the premise that there's nothing interesting going on in the labs. The machine learning space is doing crazy new things, and over the next N+1 years they're going to get exponentially more efficient at doing these crazy things, while also coming up with new crazy things to do, and better ways to do them.
Speech generation is an instructive example, I think. Four-ish years ago there was a massive advance in generating high-quality speech, with outputs close to indistinguishable from real human speech. The first version of this took ~20 minutes to produce 1 second of output, on high-powered servers. Now I can run the new versions of these models on a phone. Now something less expected: Descript uses these kinds of models to a) transcribe podcasts, and b) let you edit the text of the transcript, then c) generates natural-sounding edited versions of the audio incorporating your revisions. That's hella cool.
I expect we're going to get similar levels of improvement on text generation, as well as iterative improvements on including long-term guidance for text generation. So AI Dungeon becomes eventually a real game, rather than a dream simulator, and then the tech starts getting integrated into all kinds of big open-world games. Basically, procedurally generated worlds become a thousand times more interesting... Imagine walking around Night City (or whatever) and literally every NPC has their own story. Imagine having your own epic stories in Night City, based on the actual choices you made, instead of a couple tracks plotted out by the game devs.
And so on.
Meanwhile, I think we're seeing lots of payoff from ubiquitous video. Jugglers, for example, are much better on average because of the kind of sharing+learning that video enables. More seriously, Khan Academy and such are having a positive impact on kid's academics.
We tend only to notice hardware changes. Everyone got a car, then everyone got a phone. And now the phone does more and more (frankly miraculous) things, but we don't seem to care as much because there's no new piece of hardware. Another fun game to play: Estimate the amount of hardware that wasn't built in the last twenty years because the functionality had been subsumed by phones (and thus, software). Some people think that savings is actually more than enough to offset the build costs of the phones. (Relatedly: How much energy is saved by doing things on phones instead of desktop computers? Desktops plugged into a wall are power hungry; phones are designed to maximize battery life, so give a lot more compute per watt hour.) Meanwhile, we do a lot more because we don't have to buy the hardware to do it, and we are mainly doing it on energy-efficient pocket devices, which short circuits Jevon's Paradox.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:00 AM on December 16, 2020 [7 favorites]
Mod note: Added a CW for transphobia/whorephobia to the original post
posted by loup (staff) at 11:25 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by loup (staff) at 11:25 AM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
Last year I asked Neal Stephenson what the next big platform would be. Glasses, he replied. Networked glasses running AR, VR, XR, speech recognition, gesture recognition, etc.
posted by doctornemo at 11:33 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 11:33 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'm intrigued by Evans' conclusion, that it's not blazing new hardware build-outs we should expect but dealing with their possibilities.
(Can I mention the digital divide? Folks tend to leave that out of such conversations, especially in tech thinking circles. Thank you.)
posted by doctornemo at 11:37 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
(Can I mention the digital divide? Folks tend to leave that out of such conversations, especially in tech thinking circles. Thank you.)
posted by doctornemo at 11:37 AM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
This is how we monetize emotional labor. Where's OnlyFans but for listening to me cry about why my partner left me? $50/hr and we can meet over Zoom.
posted by fragmede at 11:52 AM on December 16, 2020
posted by fragmede at 11:52 AM on December 16, 2020
I think that's called BetterHelp.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:54 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by kaibutsu at 11:54 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
I never heard of Onlyfans until what, a month ago? I saw some doc on porno and how performers were migrating there and making bank. And excellent! What do the production houses really bring to the table these days? Disintermediation is a most excellent thing, and I am much happier to see more porn performers making money, some making really excellent money, without the capitalist bloodsuckers skimming all the profit.
Now it needs to go a step further, if we are all content creators I do not want Youtube, Patreon, Onlyfans, or whoever, sitting at the top of the pyramid skimming. The idea is out there now, the tech is available, get these parasites out of here.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:10 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Now it needs to go a step further, if we are all content creators I do not want Youtube, Patreon, Onlyfans, or whoever, sitting at the top of the pyramid skimming. The idea is out there now, the tech is available, get these parasites out of here.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:10 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
The tech was always there. Youtube's real innovation was convincing VC's to set their money on fire long enough for someone else to step in (Google) and set their money on fire instead.
Nothing is stopping a new player from entering the "money being set on fire" space.
posted by sideshow at 12:42 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Nothing is stopping a new player from entering the "money being set on fire" space.
posted by sideshow at 12:42 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Some of that will of course be the standard Get Off My Lawn nostalgia of rose-tinted memory but most of it is absolutely not
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that 'value' was a thing that was universal, accessible and can be procured for...just about what you got in your pocket there.
And we're not going back to the caves. It doesn't matter how healthy the neolithic corpses are or how much sex they had. We're plugging in and putting on the LoJack.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 12:44 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that 'value' was a thing that was universal, accessible and can be procured for...just about what you got in your pocket there.
And we're not going back to the caves. It doesn't matter how healthy the neolithic corpses are or how much sex they had. We're plugging in and putting on the LoJack.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 12:44 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I want phones to be computing nodes. If I have two, in proximity, they should act as one, giving me increased computational power, better graphics, etc. If I have eight, they should do the same, communicating and cooperating with each other to do the things I need to do. All I want on my desk is a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse and that stack of phones can be my workstation. Then if I grab one or two to hit the road, and it shouldn't matter which one I take, it's my little interface node while the rest continue to do their thing at home.
I'd like all computers to work this way. Introduce a new box to the house and it becomes part of my work system, elegantly and invisibly. We've got 7 machines - desktops and laptops and all that potential power is wasted depending on who is doing what and when. I'm rendering, or modeling, or animating and if my kids or my wife aren't on their machines - then those machines should be working to make my project go faster.
This, I think, or maybe hope, will be the next leap forward. Don't switch from one device to a newer device, just add to the pool of resources when we feel like an upgrade. Sure, diminishing returns might mean it'll be time to retire the oldest, least capable device in the house... it's taking up room, wasting energy and making heat.
posted by Wetterschneider at 1:16 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
I'd like all computers to work this way. Introduce a new box to the house and it becomes part of my work system, elegantly and invisibly. We've got 7 machines - desktops and laptops and all that potential power is wasted depending on who is doing what and when. I'm rendering, or modeling, or animating and if my kids or my wife aren't on their machines - then those machines should be working to make my project go faster.
This, I think, or maybe hope, will be the next leap forward. Don't switch from one device to a newer device, just add to the pool of resources when we feel like an upgrade. Sure, diminishing returns might mean it'll be time to retire the oldest, least capable device in the house... it's taking up room, wasting energy and making heat.
posted by Wetterschneider at 1:16 PM on December 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
Wetterschneider, you are pretty much describing AWS EC2 and you can do it right now.
posted by sideshow at 1:41 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by sideshow at 1:41 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
> Nothing is stopping a new player from entering the "money being set on fire" space.
And indeed, nothing did. YouTube was founded in 2005, fifteen years ago. 15! If you had a child that old it would be close to trying to find its very first job. For more recent references, Uber was founded 2009 and IPOd last year(2019), to the success of its earliest investors (but mostly only them. Later investors did not make fare so well.) Both TikTok and OnlyFans were started in 2016, Betterhelp in 2013. Betterhelp requires (in my state) an LMFT, which requires 2-3 years of school and certification, before allowing performers/therapists on their platform. All it takes to be on OnlyFans is to be 18.
To round out the reporting on OnlyFans on Metafilter, a medic (like, an EMT), joined OnlyFans to "make ends meet" and the New York Post tried to shame her for her "racy side gig". Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rushed to her defense in pointing out that "The actual scandalous headline here is 'Medics in the United States need two jobs to survive'." Not blue-worthy on its own, but I'll mention it since we're on the topic.
posted by fragmede at 2:03 PM on December 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
And indeed, nothing did. YouTube was founded in 2005, fifteen years ago. 15! If you had a child that old it would be close to trying to find its very first job. For more recent references, Uber was founded 2009 and IPOd last year(2019), to the success of its earliest investors (but mostly only them. Later investors did not make fare so well.) Both TikTok and OnlyFans were started in 2016, Betterhelp in 2013. Betterhelp requires (in my state) an LMFT, which requires 2-3 years of school and certification, before allowing performers/therapists on their platform. All it takes to be on OnlyFans is to be 18.
To round out the reporting on OnlyFans on Metafilter, a medic (like, an EMT), joined OnlyFans to "make ends meet" and the New York Post tried to shame her for her "racy side gig". Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rushed to her defense in pointing out that "The actual scandalous headline here is 'Medics in the United States need two jobs to survive'." Not blue-worthy on its own, but I'll mention it since we're on the topic.
posted by fragmede at 2:03 PM on December 16, 2020 [9 favorites]
I never heard of Onlyfans until what, a month ago?
You must not hang out on Reddit much. Pretty much any sub that’s even remotely NSFW has become little more than endless posts for a bajillion OnlyFans workers.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:24 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
You must not hang out on Reddit much. Pretty much any sub that’s even remotely NSFW has become little more than endless posts for a bajillion OnlyFans workers.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:24 PM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]
fragmede, it was only when Little Hobo started rickrolling me that I realised she is younger than the phenomenon of rickrolling itself.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:43 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:43 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
I don't keep anything on my phone anymore. I use Gadzorp.
posted by sexyrobot at 3:24 PM on December 16, 2020
posted by sexyrobot at 3:24 PM on December 16, 2020
(Can I mention the digital divide? Folks tend to leave that out of such conversations, especially in tech thinking circles. Thank you.)
Agree. Many low income students are struggling with digital learning because they either don’t have high speed internet at home or lack a laptop computer. Sometimes both.
Most young people are very familiar with smartphones today but some low income people in their 20s aren’t comfortable using Microsoft Word or Excel because they didn’t have easy access to a laptop/desktop computer growing up. I’ve taught technology skills to young people that were surprised to learn there are keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste.
posted by mundo at 3:59 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
Agree. Many low income students are struggling with digital learning because they either don’t have high speed internet at home or lack a laptop computer. Sometimes both.
Most young people are very familiar with smartphones today but some low income people in their 20s aren’t comfortable using Microsoft Word or Excel because they didn’t have easy access to a laptop/desktop computer growing up. I’ve taught technology skills to young people that were surprised to learn there are keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste.
posted by mundo at 3:59 PM on December 16, 2020 [5 favorites]
There are some efforts to help the poor access affordable internet but more needs to be done.
posted by mundo at 4:02 PM on December 16, 2020
posted by mundo at 4:02 PM on December 16, 2020
What if the next big thing is what happens when technologies (solar, batteries, computing, networking, connected machines, online learning) combine to enable that last quarter of people to get online and use technology to change their lives?
I manage an off the grid space with gardens and stuff and we added some wireless battery/solar security cameras, but the most useful thing about them is knowing when it rained so I don’t have to go water the garden. As all kinds of stuff gets cheaper and more usable, it could make a big difference to people who aren’t just too lazy to use a light switch or whatever the rich person use case is.
posted by snofoam at 5:43 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I manage an off the grid space with gardens and stuff and we added some wireless battery/solar security cameras, but the most useful thing about them is knowing when it rained so I don’t have to go water the garden. As all kinds of stuff gets cheaper and more usable, it could make a big difference to people who aren’t just too lazy to use a light switch or whatever the rich person use case is.
posted by snofoam at 5:43 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
Um. Did anyone mention "Software that does not suck" yet? I'd like my google agent to learn that when I pause, I'm not necessarily done thinking, and next thing I know I'm getting search results I didn't want for something I hadn't finished articulating.
posted by mikelieman at 6:56 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by mikelieman at 6:56 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
I'd like to recommend an astonishingly prescient novel by “expert dreamer” Fred Pohl: The Age of the Pussyfoot (1966). It anticipates mobile phones, ubiquitous access to information, YouTube channels, monetisation, the gig economy (mediated by those mobile-phone equivalents), “influencing” as a career, and probably a bunch of other stuff. Oh yes, and state-level attacks using useful idiots as political agitators. It's not my favourite story of his, but wow, he predicted a lot.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:17 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:17 PM on December 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
"Everyone" having a smartphone only became "including me" one year ago because I was able to score a cheap Android phone for $16 on clearance.
posted by JHarris at 8:09 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 8:09 PM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
One of the things I've already found deeply disconcerting since iPhones arrived is the absolute eagerness with which so many people have volunteered to keep a device whose functions include those of a prisoner's electronic ankle bracelet within millimetres of their own bodies at all times.
It's quite a change from the past, but is it really that odd? It's not as if the iPhone is only an ankle bracelet; we're all aware of the useful things smartphones can let us do on the move, like look at maps, communicate with friends and family, read books, do work, play games, etc. I'm sure people would prefer that they not be trackable but even the most privacy-conscious people I know still think the benefits are worth the costs.
posted by adrianhon at 1:26 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
It's quite a change from the past, but is it really that odd? It's not as if the iPhone is only an ankle bracelet; we're all aware of the useful things smartphones can let us do on the move, like look at maps, communicate with friends and family, read books, do work, play games, etc. I'm sure people would prefer that they not be trackable but even the most privacy-conscious people I know still think the benefits are worth the costs.
posted by adrianhon at 1:26 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
For me, the thing that seems to maybe be even a bigger issue than loss of privacy, which people appear to have accepted, is the relentlessness tied to technology, where the ability to rest without losing track of the world feels deeply changed. My feeling is that this is a major factor in the type of political unrest we have been facing, where the older generations feel overwhelmed by constant change in how the social order is understood.
Some of those changes are necessary and for the good, but the speed of which they are being taken up, adopted as "known", and expected to be implemented is a sharp divide from the past and appears to feed a lot of fear, anger, and confusion for many. Again though, many of those changes are long overdue and for the good, but it may be indicative of a larger set of demands technology is placing on the society where some other demands for constant attention aren't as potentially beneficial. It's very much a young person's world now, where the pace of social change better fits coming into one's own than trying to get comfortable in one's place.
A constant stream of new tech or apps are developed without a clear vision of where they will lead or what the pitfalls may be, that's capitalism I guess, but it means that society is always falling behind in reacting to these developments, with rules and laws unable to keep pace with the change and people needing to be constantly monitoring developments so as not to be left behind in whatever change comes next. It's exhausting and there's some danger mixed in with the positive elements of that change. I don't know what to think about that really, but it feels like the pace of change is outracing societies ability to cope with it all.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:52 AM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
Some of those changes are necessary and for the good, but the speed of which they are being taken up, adopted as "known", and expected to be implemented is a sharp divide from the past and appears to feed a lot of fear, anger, and confusion for many. Again though, many of those changes are long overdue and for the good, but it may be indicative of a larger set of demands technology is placing on the society where some other demands for constant attention aren't as potentially beneficial. It's very much a young person's world now, where the pace of social change better fits coming into one's own than trying to get comfortable in one's place.
A constant stream of new tech or apps are developed without a clear vision of where they will lead or what the pitfalls may be, that's capitalism I guess, but it means that society is always falling behind in reacting to these developments, with rules and laws unable to keep pace with the change and people needing to be constantly monitoring developments so as not to be left behind in whatever change comes next. It's exhausting and there's some danger mixed in with the positive elements of that change. I don't know what to think about that really, but it feels like the pace of change is outracing societies ability to cope with it all.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:52 AM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
Right – I don't mean to be a pollyanna about this, given [waves vaguely at flaming wreckage of the internet]. And perhaps the choice people are making to buy and carry smartphones is a constrained choice at best (Apple or Android!) and in truth, not a choice at all, despite the coating of sugar around the pill.
The grow-or-die VC-funded business models that strip our privacy; the lack of regulation; the absence of non-commercial alternatives; our general capitalist system; these are all things that turn this combo internet device/camera/handled console/music player into your ankle monitor.
posted by adrianhon at 2:09 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
The grow-or-die VC-funded business models that strip our privacy; the lack of regulation; the absence of non-commercial alternatives; our general capitalist system; these are all things that turn this combo internet device/camera/handled console/music player into your ankle monitor.
posted by adrianhon at 2:09 AM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
It's very much a young person's world now, where the pace of social change better fits coming into one's own than trying to get comfortable in one's place.
So, society just sheds and leaves behind anyone not entrepreneurial or self-assured enough to be able to survive? That seems a lot like the techno-libertarian "got mine, fuck you" mindset writ large as the new social order. That's going to take out a substantial number of young people, as well. Alphas and betas, I guess?
posted by Thorzdad at 4:26 AM on December 17, 2020
So, society just sheds and leaves behind anyone not entrepreneurial or self-assured enough to be able to survive? That seems a lot like the techno-libertarian "got mine, fuck you" mindset writ large as the new social order. That's going to take out a substantial number of young people, as well. Alphas and betas, I guess?
posted by Thorzdad at 4:26 AM on December 17, 2020
So, society just sheds and leaves behind anyone not entrepreneurial or self-assured enough to be able to survive?
Who knows? I'm not advocating the way things are, just noting that's how they appear to be at the moment, where "Move fast and break things" does seem to be winning a substantial portion of the battle, while others are making the most of their new chance to finally make their voices heard. That's why it's both a curse and a blessing in some ways that can't be easily sorted out. I just know that we all, everyone in society, are reacting to the same large scale stimuli, but responding to it in radically different and often opposed ways, and that's a real problem.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:46 AM on December 17, 2020
Who knows? I'm not advocating the way things are, just noting that's how they appear to be at the moment, where "Move fast and break things" does seem to be winning a substantial portion of the battle, while others are making the most of their new chance to finally make their voices heard. That's why it's both a curse and a blessing in some ways that can't be easily sorted out. I just know that we all, everyone in society, are reacting to the same large scale stimuli, but responding to it in radically different and often opposed ways, and that's a real problem.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:46 AM on December 17, 2020
It's very much a young person's world now
or so Marketing would have us believe.
In fact being a young person in 2020 appears to me be an overwhelmingly shitty experience compared to being one in 1970. I guess people don't miss what they never had, but knowing clearly what my own kids could have had were it not for the insane demands that people now have the means to put on each other makes the relentless mandatory connectivity of their world a source of ongoing sadness for me.
posted by flabdablet at 7:03 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
or so Marketing would have us believe.
In fact being a young person in 2020 appears to me be an overwhelmingly shitty experience compared to being one in 1970. I guess people don't miss what they never had, but knowing clearly what my own kids could have had were it not for the insane demands that people now have the means to put on each other makes the relentless mandatory connectivity of their world a source of ongoing sadness for me.
posted by flabdablet at 7:03 AM on December 17, 2020 [10 favorites]
It's very much a young person's world now, where the pace of social change better fits coming into one's own than trying to get comfortable in one's place.
Between 1945-1965, the US completely re-wrote it's housing model, with the government's help, erasing tons of peoples' history and their culture in the process. Smartphones are not the US's first swing at mass social change.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:20 AM on December 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
Between 1945-1965, the US completely re-wrote it's housing model, with the government's help, erasing tons of peoples' history and their culture in the process. Smartphones are not the US's first swing at mass social change.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:20 AM on December 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
Every one of these technology futurecasting exercises I've ever seen blithely ignores the increasing difficulty we will have in both obtaining and disposing of energy.
posted by hypnogogue at 7:31 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by hypnogogue at 7:31 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
In fact being a young person in 2020 appears to me be an overwhelmingly shitty experience compared to being one in 1970.
Good or bad, it's only that the constant demand on attention and to be up on the "new" is more suited to the young for how they engage with the world and, as you say, for not knowing anything different.
Smartphones are not the US's first swing at mass social change.
It's not just smart phones, it's almost every aspect of society that's undergoing rapid unplanned and difficult to account for changes often just because some tech dude thinks they found a cool way around the rules or by some company taking up space that once was considered a shared resource without any consideration for where that might lead.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:34 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Good or bad, it's only that the constant demand on attention and to be up on the "new" is more suited to the young for how they engage with the world and, as you say, for not knowing anything different.
Smartphones are not the US's first swing at mass social change.
It's not just smart phones, it's almost every aspect of society that's undergoing rapid unplanned and difficult to account for changes often just because some tech dude thinks they found a cool way around the rules or by some company taking up space that once was considered a shared resource without any consideration for where that might lead.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:34 AM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
For me, the thing that seems to maybe be even a bigger issue than loss of privacy, which people appear to have accepted, is the relentlessness tied to technology, where the ability to rest without losing track of the world feels deeply changed.
For me the biggest thing is that when there was a worldwide pandemic and the privacy invading technology that was already tracking every single move every single one of was making .... was not used for public good. At all. We already have an existing private infrastructure of extensive and invasive contract tracing but it is only used to cram advertising down our throats. It could have been used to track and monitor disease, backward and forward contact trace and save maybe a hundred thousand lives. Instead it showed me ads for adjustable weights that were out of stock.
posted by srboisvert at 1:53 PM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
For me the biggest thing is that when there was a worldwide pandemic and the privacy invading technology that was already tracking every single move every single one of was making .... was not used for public good. At all. We already have an existing private infrastructure of extensive and invasive contract tracing but it is only used to cram advertising down our throats. It could have been used to track and monitor disease, backward and forward contact trace and save maybe a hundred thousand lives. Instead it showed me ads for adjustable weights that were out of stock.
posted by srboisvert at 1:53 PM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
For me the biggest thing is that when there was a worldwide pandemic and the privacy invading technology that was already tracking every single move every single one of was making .... was not used for public good. At all.
This is false.
Smartphones were used extensively and successfully for contact tracing in places like Taiwan. Serious efforts at contact tracing using smartphones in the US were seriously hampered by lack of government coordination and prooobably additional complexity due to privacy requirements.
In case that last statement is controversial: Product requirements can be very expensive. If you want something that works for one function and ignores lots of rules, you can have something in a couple weeks. Adding privacy requirements to contact tracing added weeks-to-months of analysis+argument around whether the protocols were actually privacy-preserving and whether it should be the corporations or (state!) governments running the apps. Meanwhile, privacy preservation also adds burden on the analysis side, where less info is available due to the privacy restrictions.
As I see it, the implicit decision was that privacy is more important than contact tracing, which ultimately tanked the project: by the time the design was done, the stakeholders on board, and the apps written, the infection rate was too high for tracing to help.
It's absolutely worth arguing about whether that was a good outcome or not. But it's not true that nothing was done.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:47 PM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
This is false.
Smartphones were used extensively and successfully for contact tracing in places like Taiwan. Serious efforts at contact tracing using smartphones in the US were seriously hampered by lack of government coordination and prooobably additional complexity due to privacy requirements.
In case that last statement is controversial: Product requirements can be very expensive. If you want something that works for one function and ignores lots of rules, you can have something in a couple weeks. Adding privacy requirements to contact tracing added weeks-to-months of analysis+argument around whether the protocols were actually privacy-preserving and whether it should be the corporations or (state!) governments running the apps. Meanwhile, privacy preservation also adds burden on the analysis side, where less info is available due to the privacy restrictions.
As I see it, the implicit decision was that privacy is more important than contact tracing, which ultimately tanked the project: by the time the design was done, the stakeholders on board, and the apps written, the infection rate was too high for tracing to help.
It's absolutely worth arguing about whether that was a good outcome or not. But it's not true that nothing was done.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:47 PM on December 17, 2020 [5 favorites]
In fact being a young person in 2020 appears to me be an overwhelmingly shitty experience compared to being one in 1970.
I'd guess it is lightyears easier for queer kids and neurodivergent kids to find other people?
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:10 PM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I'd guess it is lightyears easier for queer kids and neurodivergent kids to find other people?
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:10 PM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
sorry schadenfrau about the onlyfans-for-everything link! i read it as a satirical take on the aforementioned 'attention-focused products' big tech/media are seeking to monopolize. fragmede has the better angle. thanks loup for the cw save.
> The grow-or-die VC-funded business models that strip our privacy; the lack of regulation; the absence of non-commercial alternatives; our general capitalist system; these are all things that turn this combo internet device/camera/handled console/music player into your ankle monitor.
World After Capital: Getting Over Privacy (Finish) - "We can't really protect privacy without handing control of technology into the hands of a few and conversely decentralized innovation requires reduced privacy. So what should we do? The answer, I think, is to embrace a post-privacy world. We should work to protect people and their freedom, instead of protecting data and privacy. In other words allowing more information to become public but strengthening individual freedom to stand against the potential consequences."[*]
or, in other words, lower the stakes :P
posted by kliuless at 10:33 PM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
> The grow-or-die VC-funded business models that strip our privacy; the lack of regulation; the absence of non-commercial alternatives; our general capitalist system; these are all things that turn this combo internet device/camera/handled console/music player into your ankle monitor.
World After Capital: Getting Over Privacy (Finish) - "We can't really protect privacy without handing control of technology into the hands of a few and conversely decentralized innovation requires reduced privacy. So what should we do? The answer, I think, is to embrace a post-privacy world. We should work to protect people and their freedom, instead of protecting data and privacy. In other words allowing more information to become public but strengthening individual freedom to stand against the potential consequences."[*]
or, in other words, lower the stakes :P
posted by kliuless at 10:33 PM on December 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
In fact being a young person in 2020 appears to me be an overwhelmingly shitty experience compared to being one in 1970.
The "experience" of growing up is pretty relative and hard to put a value on, but kids today have a lot of freedom, in particular the freedom from things that used to be more common in the 1970s. A young person today is less likely to be raped or murdered or kidnapped, because the world is broadly just much safer (in the US, anyway) than it was decades ago. A young person today is less likely to have experienced corporal punishment in school. They're probably less likely to have experienced abuse at home. They're less likely to get pregnant or get someone pregnant unintentionally. If not straight, they're less likely to have to live life closeted. We could go on and on.
Today's youth has the existential threat of climate change; the Cold War generations had the existential threat of nuclear war. (Which hasn't really gone away, but it doesn't permeate the culture in the way that it used to.) Seems like a bit of a wash from a kid's perspective.
If being a kid today really is that bad, we should identify exactly what's going on, because growing up today ought to be generally better than basically any other time in history. I think surveillance capitalism sucks, but I'm not sure I'd hop in a time machine if given the opportunity, or advise anyone else to do so.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:52 AM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]
The "experience" of growing up is pretty relative and hard to put a value on, but kids today have a lot of freedom, in particular the freedom from things that used to be more common in the 1970s. A young person today is less likely to be raped or murdered or kidnapped, because the world is broadly just much safer (in the US, anyway) than it was decades ago. A young person today is less likely to have experienced corporal punishment in school. They're probably less likely to have experienced abuse at home. They're less likely to get pregnant or get someone pregnant unintentionally. If not straight, they're less likely to have to live life closeted. We could go on and on.
Today's youth has the existential threat of climate change; the Cold War generations had the existential threat of nuclear war. (Which hasn't really gone away, but it doesn't permeate the culture in the way that it used to.) Seems like a bit of a wash from a kid's perspective.
If being a kid today really is that bad, we should identify exactly what's going on, because growing up today ought to be generally better than basically any other time in history. I think surveillance capitalism sucks, but I'm not sure I'd hop in a time machine if given the opportunity, or advise anyone else to do so.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:52 AM on December 19, 2020 [4 favorites]
I would be remiss if I didn't follow-up with Rolling Stone's interview with the aforementioned medic.
While the Internet has really changed what it's like to be a kid today, (eg there's a shit-ton of free mass-media therapy on tiktok in a teen-accessible format), I think the March for Our Lives movement really says a lot about student life these days.
Also related to the broader topic, the proposed second US COVID-19 stimulus bill contains the Emergency Broadband Connections act, which aims to get wifi and computing devices in the hands of lower-income students.
posted by fragmede at 1:39 PM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
While the Internet has really changed what it's like to be a kid today, (eg there's a shit-ton of free mass-media therapy on tiktok in a teen-accessible format), I think the March for Our Lives movement really says a lot about student life these days.
Also related to the broader topic, the proposed second US COVID-19 stimulus bill contains the Emergency Broadband Connections act, which aims to get wifi and computing devices in the hands of lower-income students.
posted by fragmede at 1:39 PM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
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posted by Thorzdad at 4:55 AM on December 16, 2020 [3 favorites]