Social media be like:

You wouldn't have your phone if it weren't for capitalism extracting value from foreign country's laborers, and the twin force of pushing the industrial waste of our technology as an externality on to other impoverished countries. Take that socialism.

"systems like Siri and Echo, because they serve up data from third parties, might begin to be manipulated by some bot-equivalent of SEO to respond to certain queries with advertisements. In this environment, no automated methods exist for filtering out ads — and since conversational interfaces are often run by retailers, there is no incentive to do so."
https://howwegettonext.com/how-bots-were-born-from-spam-62f6c621351f#.xw5va20ac

"With Alexa, where advertising is currently limited, Amazon is in talks to offer companies a variety of promotional opportunities, including some that are already being tested.
[...]
Amazon is also looking to tap advertising in Alexa's skills. Someone asking the Echo for help cleaning up a spill might be nudged to use a specific brand."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/amazon-alexa-is-opening-up-to-more-sponsored-product-ads.html

"all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the “I.” In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities."
http://www.roughtype.com/?p=360

"the question of making money is of little importance, and comparing social interactions to money changing hands completely obscures the situation. Much more intricate than money exchange are social standing, peer opinion, having friends, and being liked. You know, the human things. I continually bristle at the notion that our interactions online can be explained in economic terms."
http://bokardo.com/archives/the-non-collision-of-relationship-and-independent-george/

"In low-trust societies that are not functioning well, these layers of porous boundaries must be barred and locked. People are left with a binary choice between a vulnerable “public” that is exposed to all, and a socially dead “private” that is disconnected from others (whether inside a home or vehicle). Unfortunately, the internet has mirrored the trajectory of the society at large."
https://carcinisation.com/2014/08/29/two-patterns/

"This idea would definitely receive a ton of pushback, especially from companies whose business relies on getting users addicted to their products. However, the maintaining toxic business models shouldn’t be a priority. If a user does not want to launch Facebook, then they shouldn’t have to. If an app can drive engagement, or whatever one might call mindlessly scrolling, only with an annoying push notification, maybe they shouldn’t be able to."
https://ramblingspace.com/posts/apple-created-attention-sinkhole-ways-fix/

"In the mid 1990s, during the first wave of widespread internet use, the key terms used to conceptualize the network were spatial: the basic unit of the World Wide Web was the homepage, and the totality of the system itself was, at least in the media, cyberspace. Discussion of the social and political potential of online place had a flavor that was explicitly utopian and vaguely nostalgic."
http://www.sevensixfive.net/myspace/myspacetwopointoh.html

"But in doing so, the CEO of the company said that they were considering reddit not just a private company, but “a government for a new type of community”. He even went to describe how he sees the actions by the moderators akin to law enforcement officers. But, how do you reconcile such great ambition with the fact that your CEO, or president, resigns from the government because of a seating arrangement issue?"
https://ramblingspace.com/posts/on-building-a-new-world/

"A demon thread is a recipe for bad attempts at communicating. Lots of people are yelling at once. Their defenses are raised. There's a sense that if you give in, you or your people look like losers or villains.

This'll make people worse at listening and communicating."
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/BZtAavpsy9WtMYgEL/recognizing-demon-threads

If you didn't write it yourself, its possible to be hijacked by a third party for nefarious ends.

Here's a hypothetical story about stealing your credit cards using npm: https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-passwords-from-your-site-here-s-how-9a8cb347c5b5

Here's a very real story about people infecting wordpress plugins: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2018/01/wordpress-supply-chain-attacks/

Combine with https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/featured/hackers-hijack-popular-chrome-extension-inject-code-web-developers-browsers/ and we've got a really shitty situation brewing.

This pattern is everywhere.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-robo-call-moguls-outwitted-the-government-and-completely-wrecked-the-do-not-call-list/2018/01/09/52c769b6-df7a-11e7-bbd0-9dfb2e37492a_story.html

“It’s the Internet’s most resilient parasite.” http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/12223/markovian-parallax-denigrate-usenet-spam/ …

"What does well in these environments is '[x] is the greatest'. And that was actually a very interesting insight that I started to see really get replicated in that world of social media: Which is that it pushes us to the extremes. Because everything is based on popularity, everything is based on generating a reaction out of people. So its not really designed for truth and story telling as it is for extremism." [1/2]

"It was one thing to watch and do that for [...] some of theses big companies, but then I started to watch that very same thing happening thru out the rest of the world. I started to watch media companies behave in the same way... and stop telling stories that mattered, and start telling stories that would generate a lot of likes and clicks or create a lot of either anger or excitement (two of the most sharable emotions)." [2/2]
https://youtu.be/AkeZJh937sE?t=2m32s

Mark Zuckerberg is on record for saying that the list of friends feature is a great way to prevent spam. Lucky You! https://youtu.be/Czw-dtTP6oU?t=4m57s

But all they've really done is position themselves as a proxy for spam. Now If you want to get your advertisement out in front of a lot of people, you need to pay them. Or worse, it incentives the creation of some kind of viral bullshit that gets you to share to your network.

Facebook's core philosophy on connecting people and knowledge sharing has been perverted into little more than a surface level attraction space combined with a vehicle for targeted advertising.

"Then, Peter Thiel, as René Girard's student in Philosophy at Stanford, after having been the very first investor of Facebook, explained this theory to Mark Zuckerberg to convince him to make a platform of "mimetic desire". Who owns a machine to create desire, owns the world." https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/godfather-like-button-dead-long-live-his-work-arnaud-auger/

"sad part, as Sir Kenneth Robinson says, is that we lose this as we grow up.

Our [...] institutions are failing us, they're not providing the context for this curiosity to explode, to continue to emerge indefinitely.

Instead we slowly die.

And I think our goal is to create media, to create content, to create spaces that allow us to stay curious,
to stay alive,
to awaken the wonder junkie in all of us,
to unleash the brave, reckless gods within us all.

That is my goal"
https://youtu.be/VOVmVMJEhg8?t=2m7s

"Framing is very important. Where I agree [...] that there are serious systematic problems with the way we route information between people — problems that cause political schismatism, failures of empathy, and in some cases direct physical danger. However, [...] framing of this problem as one of attacks on consensus reality implies a solution with unfortunate authoritarian tinges: the reconsolidation of power over information." /cont

"...Instead, I suggest framing the problem as systematic bias in exposure to information, in ways that limit the effectiveness of our normal intellectual growth. Rather than rebuilding the tower, we should be breaking down the walls."
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/contra-ovadya-on-post-truth-83bb15acce7c

A company primarily funded via advertising is inventing wireheading as a service...

“An AI agent motivated by satisfaction expressed by humans will be less likely to take actions against human interest,” the Google researchers write. “Imagine if a home assistant could sense when a user responds with an angry or frustrated tone and this acted as a negative incentive, training the algorithm not to repeat the action that led to the user’s frustration?”
https://qz.com/1209466/google-is-building-ai-to-make-humans-smile/

👌 👈

TensorFlow as Consumer Cattle Prods

"I deal with things that scare me by trying to understand them. I've found one of the best ways to understand something is to relate it to something you know. For me, rewrite interesting stories using jokes and subtle language transforms helps me map an idea space to something I'm already familiar with. The humor keeps me interested.

This is the result:"
http://telegra.ph/TensorFlow-as-Consumer-Cattle-Prods-02-24

Oh cool, a fork of mastodon trying to run it as a decentralized network? Called Hiveway?

Oh wait, no, they're trying to turn it into a centralized advertisement ran monarchy themed after the structure of a corporation. Only their architecture is decentralized.

All the bureaucracy of a slow moving monstrosity, all the tact of a SV hype machine.

Tho... Thats giving too much credit. It looks like they're just pumping an ERC20 coin by selling a narrative of being a leader in an ad-driven startup.

"The other thing I could have done is, if I've been using this bot all along, the bot could have kept my own archive of wall posts in my own data store and I could simply instruct it to search my own archive.

Now you may say, well, that's a trivial example. But actually it is very foundational. It completely inverts the power relationship
between networks and their participants."
https://youtu.be/t8qo7pzH_NM?t=10m48s

"... It would make it very hard for [a facebook], or [a twitter] or any one of these companies to [control too much of the network], because new networks could come up.

A cooperatively owned network, cooperatively owned by the [users], for instance, and the [users] could participate simultaneously in the new network and the old network. And it's the very threat of the creation of these new networks that would substantially reduce the power of the existing networks."

Do you think the 'right to be forgotten' could be stretched to apply to book burning?

I mean, someone turned Wikipedia into an printed encyclopedia at one point. There already weirdness there: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/06/wikipedia-censorship-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling

I've been thinking about how decentralized/federated systems are inherently weak against that kind of political ruling.

With talk of regulating Facebook, I've been worrying about how government policies can create ham-fisted effects that only centralized networks can comply with.

A few got upset the other day that I pointed out impersonating a federal agent on hiveway was troublesome. But I'm genuinely concerned about the intersection of legal and our ability to run networks.

Its a stretch (hypothetical), but can you imagine a U.S. marshal coming into your home and seizing federated server b/c it happens to have copied down an illegal number?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo19Y4tw0l8

DMCA+Piracy are of course only one example, but they can get pretty fucked: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/whatcha-gonna-do-when-they-come-for-you/

Albert Wenger talked about this a bit in 2015:

"The European Union has said, if you want to have information on people who live in the European Union, you have to keep it on European Union servers. That actually makes it harder for new networks to get started, not easier. It actually cements the role of the existing networks instead of saying we need to create opportunities for competition with existing networks."
http://continuations.com/post/108912689660/big-and-bot-policy-proposals-transcript

It has stuck with me ever since.

One of my first toots on this platform is about that worry:

"One of the long term failures states of federated platforms could be a centralized corporation - ("google") takes over and effectively centralizes it." https://mastodon.social/@ultimape/1413700

In my head 'corporation' is synonymous with 'social institution'. I don't distinguish between governments and corporations that much. Technically municipalities *ARE* corporations, and aren't much more than small local governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipality

It would be really tragic if the EU's stance on keeping data about Europeans on European servers (which seems to be policy written on the back of snoden's revelations of the extent of the united state's hacking programs), end up being used as leverage to snuff out decentralized competition to big social networks before we get a chance to get off the ground.

... Lots of smart people read Albert Wenger's blog, and not all of them are as scrupulous as him. :(

"In essence, Facebook was presenting apps as quasi-endorsed extensions of its core service to users who couldn’t have been expected to know better. That might explain why so many people feel violated by Facebook this week—they might never have realized that they were even using foreign, non-Facebook applications in the first place, let alone ones that were siphoning off and selling their data. The website always just looked like Facebook."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my-cow-game-extracted-your-facebook-data/556214/

"The videos activate our voyeurism, the sound recordings tempt us with secrets, and the data promises a kind of omniscience, but all of it is a mirage — there is no one here to watch, there is no secret to find, and the data, which seems to be so important, is actually absurd. In this sense, the project mirrors the experience of browsing the web — full of tantalizing potential, but ultimately empty of life."
http://networkeffect.io/ (note: interactive site and requires audio)

Earlier in this thread I talked about how apple was a hardware company, implying they're prob not interested in snooping your data for marketing. That isn't to say they aren't covered tarnish themselves.

They seem to be pulling all sorts of shenanigans with regard to how they handle their trademark and right to repair.

"It is not obvious to the court what trademark function justifies Apple’s choice of imprinting the Apple logo on so many internal components"
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3yadk/apple-sued-an-independent-iphone-repair-shop-owner-and-lost

"The bottom line that we found was that, you make something social and that kind of rethinks the whole space. A social version of anything will almost always be mroe engaging and outperform a non-social version.
[...]
But if someone wanted to make a social music app..." [2010]
https://www.hoooktube.com/watch?v=CRUOl03nZIc&t=19m31s

"...many users are still annoyed about the Facebook account requirement --after all, not everyone wants sketchy Facebook integration, whether it's hidden or not." [2011]
https://www.pcworld.com/article/240646/spotify_adds_facebook_requirement_angering_users.html

"The engagement is fundamentally manipulated; the content you’re seeing, you’re seeing because someone gamed an algorithm; the products people are pushing to you are inauthentic and most of the comments under them are fake. That’s not the system that we want to live in."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-their-accounts-into-bots-on-instagram

"...it allows marketers to do so indirectly via the option of targeting people based on interests. If liking “Lady Gaga” on Facebook, for example, is associated with the personality trait of extroversion, and liking “Stargate” goes hand in hand with introversion, then targeting users associated with each of these Likes allows one to target extroverted and introverted user segments."
https://hbr.org/2018/05/what-marketers-should-know-about-personality-based-marketing

"While still in its infancy, there are more and more commercial attempts at predicting personality from people’s digital footprints. IBM’s Watson Personality Insights, for example, uses natural language processing to digest bodies of text written by a specific user, like tweets and blog posts, to unearth their personality traits, needs, and values. [...] will become available to industry at large."
https://hbr.org/2018/05/what-marketers-should-know-about-personality-based-marketing

Embodied cognition in AI, what's that?

<<“In the past, communications with customers were essentially monologues—companies just talked at consumers,” Krishna says. “Then they evolved into dialogues, with customers providing feedback. Now they’re becoming multidimensional conversations, with products finding their own voices and consumers responding viscerally and subconsciously to them.”>>
https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-science-of-sensory-marketing

"Perhaps that’s what’s so frightening about Cambridge Analytica and the overall surveillance-based ad model. Like a black widow or a murderous butler, Facebook is the poisoner inside your home. Even with the years and years of warnings [...] Facebook settled so firmly into the emotional labor niche in our lives, that we resisted the truth that it was spying on us to turn a quick buck. When the realization finally hits, we feel the kind of intense betrayal"
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/28/17293056/facebook-deletefacebook-social-network-monopoly

"The systems don’t actually understand the content, they just return what they predict will keep us clicking. That’s because their primary function is to help achieve one or two specific key performance indicators (KPIs) chosen by the company. We manage what we can measure. It’s much easier to measure time on site or monthly average user stats than to quantify the outcomes of serving users conspiratorial or fraudulent content."
https://www.wired.com/story/creating-ethical-recommendation-engines/