Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • Eat your vegetables

    There’s a great piece by Parker Molloy about the “eat your vegetables” argument over social media: the idea that if you use social media, you should be compelled to read or hear views you disagree with.

    Like Molloy, I disagree.

    People get to pick what they watch on TV, right? And they get to decide which movies and concerts they want to see, yeah? Same thing for what books, newspapers, and magazines they read, correct? And people get to make their own decisions about who they hang out with, right?

    So why is social media different? Why is there this push to ensure that people can’t curate their own online experiences? It’s a weirdly paternalistic, “eat your vegetables” argument, except that these “vegetables” don’t actually have any nutritional value.

    …I was (and currently am) questioning the premise of the argument that social media platforms have a responsibility to show us “views we disagree with” in the name of understanding the broader world.

    The “views we disagree with” are rarely left-of-centre ones; they’re the ones constantly churned out by right-wingers and their friends in the press. And that means they are not views that we are unaware of, arguments we have not already debunked a million times. We’re not scared of them. We’re bored senseless by them.

    What’s going on here is a deliberate twisting, yet again, of free speech. You absolutely have the right to believe what you like and say what you want within your own circles. What you don’t have is the right to force anybody else to listen to you.

  • Expecting the expected

    With Twitter doing its best impression of the Titan submersible, the race is on to find the next big social network. Previous contender Mastodon missed its opportunity the last time there was a Twitter exodus (I saw it described today as puritan, inward-looking and Protestant, which I think is very accurate), so the current favourite is Bluesky – which was partly funded by Twitter, and has Twitter co-founder and terrible arse Jack Dorsey on its board. Facebook is expected to launch its own contender, Threads, tomorrow.

    I think Threads will get the big numbers. Not because it’s necessarily the best service, but for multiple reasons. The first is scale: Meta, Facebook’s owner, can handle massive user numbers. The second is familiarity: it looks and works like Instagram. But the third and arguably most important reason is because Meta knows what to do about nazis.

    I’ve not been online as long as some, but I’ve still been online for nearly thirty years now. And every single social platform I’ve used, from Usenet and CompuServe through forums and Web 2.0 and social media and more, has faced the same problem: sooner or later, significant numbers of people, including but not limited to nazis, will try and abuse it and weaponise it against marginalised people. The question is never whether it’ll happen; just when it’ll happen and how.

    There’s a question every technology product should ask, and that is: how can this be abused? And despite thirty-odd years of social media online, all too often the question is not considered until the abuse is already well under way.

    Bluesky and Mastodon and the various others haven’t been through this yet to any significant degree, and whenever I try to get clarity on how exactly Bluesky will protect marginalised people the answer appears to be a vague collection of optimism and vibes – which is entirely in keeping with a Jack Dorsey product – or a promise that if Bluesky isn’t doing its job right, you can go to another service that uses the same protocol. But at the moment, there are no other services that use the same protocol.

    Inevitably, the bad people are now starting to move across. Some of the worst anti-trans bigots are there now, along with some of the worst of the far right, because owning Twitter is no fun: bigots need people to abuse and to orchestrate pile-ons against, which is why bigots aren’t happy to stay on their own bigot-centred social networks such as Gab, Parler and increasingly, Twitter. And the only solution that Bluesky appears to offer is blocking, which Twitter also has and which didn’t stop Twitter becoming unusable for marginalised people.

    I have no great love for Meta, Facebook’s parent company. And I fear Mark Zuckerberg is part of the right-wing techbro mob that’s doing so much damage to democracy right now. But in the short term at least, I know that Facebook and Instagram have a reasonable set of tools to protect their users from abusers on those platforms, and so Threads will have too. I know “don’t make it too easy for nazis” is an astonishingly low bar to clear, but as far as I can see right now only Threads looks like it’ll clear it.

  • The hate factory

    In news that’ll surprise nobody, Elon Musk’s Twitter has become a hate factory. Hate speech on Twitter has existed for a long time, but it was previously considered a problem; now, it’s a feature. A new report shows that if you pay for a Twitter Blue subscription, you get a free pass for hate speech.

    The Daily Beast:

    Researchers at the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) flagged hate speech to the company in tweets from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers. Four days later, they say, 99 percent of the tweets were still up and none of the accounts had been removed…

    “What gives blue tick hate actors confidence to spew their bile is the knowledge that Elon Musk simply doesn’t care about the civil and human rights of Black people, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, as long as he can make his 8 bucks a month,” Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the CCDH, said in a statement to The Daily Beast, “Our society has benefited from decades of progress on tolerance, but Elon Musk is undoing those norms at an ever-accelerating rate, by allowing hate to prosper on the spaces he administers, all with the tacit approval of the advertisers who remain on his platform.”

    If you’re a Twitter user this won’t surprise you: posts by or about marginalised groups attract swarms of blue tick bigots, and because their replies are now prioritised you’ll see their hateful replies ahead of any other comments. And that hatred is profitable: as the article says, “five high-profile Twitter accounts responsible for consistently linking LGBT to ‘grooming’ were set to generate $6.4 million a year in advertising revenue for Twitter.”

  • The Girl Who Lost Her Glasses

    Thanks to my friend and colleague Craig Grannell, I’ve been reminded of a short story I wrote for tech site Wareable.com in (I think) 2016. I can’t find it online any more so I’m reposting it here. It’s called The Girl Who Lost Her Glasses.

    Kara didn’t notice at first. The apartment temperature was just right. The coffee was ready at the usual time. The shower was hot, but not too hot. Siri told her it’d be a sunny day and that her first lecture was at 10am. But when she stood on the scales, half-expecting bad news after a bit too much pizza last night, nothing happened. The white wall stayed white.

    Kara sighed, took off her glasses, pressed the tiny reset button and popped them back on again. “Hello” hovered briefly in front of her eyes, then disappeared. She stood on the scales again.

    Nothing.

    No weight, no BMI, no body fat composition. No Chart Of Shame gently chiding her about her lack of exercise recently. Nothing.

    She popped open the mirrored cabinet and focused on a moisturiser, waiting for the ingredients and warnings to appear. Nothing.

    “Hey Siri, can you check my glasses please?”
    “Of course, Kara,” the disembodied voice replied. “Your glasses are fully functional.”
    “Then why aren’t they working?”
    “I’m sorry, Kara, but your eyeCloud account has been suspended.”
    “Suspended? What for?”
    “Non-payment.”

    Kara groaned. She’d meant to pay the sub the other day. Money was always tight but she always paid eventually. She’d never been cut off before.

    “Well,” she said. “That sucks.”

    It’s funny what you take for granted, she thought. The apartment walls were featureless, painted in neutral colours. The bright wallpaper she’d ben so delighted with wasn’t overlaid any more; the Wall of GIFs that made her laugh most mornings was just a plain wall. The floating heads of Facebook friends and Instagram frenemies were gone too, trapped behind the glass of her phone screen. They still moved and smiled and joked when she tapped on them, of course. But tapping a phone wasn’t the same as waving to somebody in front of you or flipping the bird at an unsuspecting oversharer. It was like trying to communicate with butterflies in a box.

    A reminder from Siri: time to leave for college. Kara grabbed her backpack, swiped the lock and headed outside. And after three blocks she realised that she didn’t have the faintest idea where she was.

    It was as if somebody had run around the entire town, taking down every shop sign, emptying every shopfront, turning off every advertising billboard. The smells were still there, of course, the ground coffee and the stale beer and the dubious aromas of last night’s revellers. But every building looked the same as every other one. She’d normally follow the luminous Maps arrow past the tattoo parlour and the tablet repair shop, cutting left – or was it right? She couldn’t quite recall – past the impulse supermarket towards the centre of town and the college. But she couldn’t see the tattoo parlour, or the tablet repair shop, or the supermarket. Just endless blank frontages pained the same shades of off-white, street signs faded, missing and occasionally peppered with what looked like small bullet holes.

    “Siri, get me an Uber.” She thanked the Lord for the three-day delay between taking the ride and Uber taking payments. She’d have cash by then.

    It took Kara a minute to realise she was looking in the wrong place. The familiar Uber indicator wasn’t going to appear in the sky to show where her ride was coming from and how long it’d be. She peered at the tiny car icons on her phone, feeling like Gulliver in a world of tiny cars.

    The Uber pod rolled to a halt beside her and opened a side door. She climbed in and waited for the show to start, the so-bad-it’s-good parade of adverts for local businesses, viral hits and quirky news headlines that kept boredom at bay (and at night, kept the passengers awake when they’d had a bit to drink). Nothing. Just bare white walls. Boring, boring white walls.

    Great, Kara thought. Just when the day couldn’t get any more crappy I’ve got to sit with a bucket on my head. It wasn’t really a bucket, but it sure felt like one. It was the only spare headset available, it was absolutely ancient and it had clearly been through the wars: it didn’t sit quite right and it kept glitching, the image shearing as the prof talked everyone through the various bits of the human brain. Without it Kara wouldn’t have seen anything. With it, she was beginning to get what promised to be a major headache.

    Kara tried to look on the bright side. With no lenses the usual riot of colour in the college hallways wasn’t there to make her headache worse. The advertising that usually inhabited every flat surface floated just out of punching distance was nowhere to be seen.

    But neither were the avatars. Walking through campus was usually funny and occasionally disturbing, people presenting with dragon wings or fiery haloes or extra limbs or different genders. Some of the students turned themselves into living works of art; others just chose interesting patterns for skirts or shoes. AR fashion was so fast it could change in a single day, offered up by influencers on Instagram and instantly adopted as avatars. But not today. Without AR, everybody was wearing the same stuff in the same neutral colours, just as Kara was. It was weird seeing people strutting but not what they were strutting about: she passed a half-dozen identically dressed students congratulating one another on their apparently fierce new looks. Apparently beige was the new black: whatever looks they were rocking only existed in their contact lenses.

    Kara realised that something else was missing. Information. Normally you’d look at somebody and see their Facebook or Insta, maybe a Tinder icon or a mood indicator or a do not disturb. You’d be able to get the name of their kids or see their great passion or what they’re listening to. Same with vending machines and products in supermarkets: focus, blink, and you see the calories and maybe a serving suggestion and guides to the other things you need for the recipe. But you need your lenses for that.

    Kara made it home via another Uber, her phone desperately short of juice: it usually sat in her bag, silently communicating with her glasses. She hardly ever used the screen, but today she’d been reliant on it. She was irritated. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask for a phone to work all day?

    She grabbed a bite to eat and sat down for some Netflix. Nope. White wall, no virtual cinema screen until she got her eyeCloud account back online.

    Even the dog was missing. Normally she’d be greeted with puppy madness, the kind of joy you only get from animals who think every time you go out you’re never coming back. But Effie was a PerfectPet®, a virtual labrador who didn’t shed, didn’t need fed and wasn’t banned from apartments. No glasses, no Effie.

    And that meant no Julie either, or at least not Julie as Kara normally saw her, lounging in an armchair with that husky laugh of hers. They’d set the world to rights later, but with Julie trapped behind the glass of her tablet instead of larger than life over there.

    Two days, she thought. Two days before the money’s in and I can get my account back online. Two days. 48 hours. 2,880 minutes. 172,800 seconds.

    Just 172,800 seconds to kill.

    Kara sighed.

    “Hey, Siri,” she said. “Tell me a story.”

    It was going to be a long two days.

  • “Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.”

    This, by Cat Valente, is a superb piece about the inevitable ruin of social media – a pattern that repeats again and again.

    I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference.

    As someone who’s been in online spaces since the early 90s I’ve seen the pattern Valente describes so many times.

    I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.

    Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I’m back blogging it’s because of what Valente writes about in that piece. In recent years Twitter was a much more convenient way to connect with people, but now that Musk is running around like a comic book villain opening all the doors of Arkham Asylum it’s very clear that what we’ve always called a hellsite is going to become considerably more hellish.

    I know people who are effectively trapped on Twitter at the moment: they hate what it’s becoming but it’s where they live online; it’s where they’ve spent years building connections, and networks, and in many cases careers. They can’t just move to Mastodon and replicate all of that. So because Twitter can be and has been sold to someone who doesn’t give a fuck about them, everything they’ve made is now under threat. Twitter has become a Titanic and they’re clinging on for dear life.

    As Valente writes in the linked article, this is not new. It’s more extreme because of Twitter’s place in the culture, but it’s not new. People build communities online on platforms they don’t own or control, and sooner or later the people who do own and control those platforms destroy everything that was good about them. It’s more profitable to have people buying things and hurting each other.

     

  • Overshared

    Following on from my last post about “disruptive” tech firms, this excellent Jen Sorensen cartoon was published on The Nib (click <– for full strip).

  • Uber is running out of road

    I’m deeply cynical about so-called disruptive businesses: the AirBnbs, the Deliveroos, the Ubers. I don’t think there’s anything particularly admirable about using VC money to undercut and destroy the competition or trying to evade the regulations designed to protect the people who use the service or the people who do the work. But I was still surprised by this piece on Uber, which makes it clear that the firm is even worse, and in even worse shape, than I thought it was.

    Uber was never going to be profitable. Never. It lured drivers and riders into cars by subsidizing rides with billions and billions of dollars from the Saudi royal family, keeping up the con-artist’s ever-shifting patter about how all of this would some day stand on its own.

    According to Cory Doctorow, Uber is “a dazzle op that keeps new money flowing in, convincing people that a pile of shit this big must have a pony beneath it.” But there is no pony.

    Doctorow has written about Uber before.

    From the start, Uber’s “blitzscaling” strategy involved breaking local taxi laws (incurring potentially unlimited civil liability) while losing (lots of) money on every ride. They flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the drain.

    But they had billions to burn.

  • Stick your rainbow

    I wrote a piece for T3 about Pride Month and the way some tech firms’ support for the LGBT+ community doesn’t go beyond putting a rainbow on their social media logo.

    Earlier this year, a damning study by GLAAD confirmed what marginalised people already know: every single major social networking platform is “categorically unsafe” for LGBT+ people. But hey! They’ve put a rainbow on their logo!

    If tech firms really mean it, we need them to do more than post platitudes. We need them to make their platforms safe for marginalised people by actually enforcing their policies against harassment and hate speech. We need them to stop financially supporting anti-LGBT+ politicians in order to get tax breaks. We need them to donate to LGBT+ organisations and advocacy groups who can make a practical difference in the lives of the people who’ve been affected negatively.

    But most of all, they need to hire and promote LGBT+ people – particularly people who are also marginalised by race, class, disability or gender. Good decision-making will only come from people who really understand the problems, and who understand the positive and negative impacts of their decisions.

    But if you think the tech world is bad, they’ve got nothing on the Tories. Today the Government Equalities Office and the Conservative party have posted their scheduled Pride tweets despite being demonstrably anti-LGBT+. It’s particularly galling to see the GEO claiming credit for equal marriage in Northern Ireland, something the Conservatives and their DUP allies fought tooth and nail.

    As I wrote in my piece:

    it’s a hollow, selfish gesture: the aim isn’t to help LGBT+ people, but to burnish the corporate image. Telling the world that you agree LGBT+ people exist means nothing when LGBT+ people’s rights, healthcare and safety are under unprecedented attack worldwide.

    And it means even less when you’re the ones doing the attacking.

  • Doing it for the kids

    My son and daughter go to different schools but right now they’re getting their education in the same location: my home. They’re both learning remotely, joining their classmates and teachers on Microsoft Teams and using things like my phone to take pictures of their work and upload it to the school.

    What’s really striking about this is how much work the teachers have put into it, how patient they are with the kids and how brilliantly they’re using the technology. Not all heroes wear capes.

  • Adam Banks RIP

    Sad news today: Adam Banks has died. Adam was the guiding light of MacUser magazine, one of the UK’s very best magazines, and while I never worked for him I was a great admirer not just of his magazine but of the love his contributors clearly had for him. He and I were friends on social media where I often shared his incisive and insightful takes on technology, on publishing and on trying to be a good human. He was one of the good guys and he’ll be missed.

    My friend, former MacUser contributor Craig Grannell, has written more about Adam here.