Don Norman attempts to explain Why bad technology dominates our lives:

Curiosity is, on the whole, a virtue. We have evolved to be curious. Our nervous system is especially sensitive to change, and changes in the environment attract attention. But the technology-centered view labels this natural, creative trait as a liability: Curiosity is renamed as distraction. A human virtue is now turned into a liability.

Worse, many businesses have learned to exploit our curiosity. The continual bombardment of tantalizing tidbits of information deliberately designed to grab our attention away from other, potentially more valuable activities are distractions that can lead to accidents, injury, and interpersonal problems. What kind of business exploits curiosity for its own ends? Almost any business that discovers there are profits to be made by continually engaging people’s curiosity, hopes, and interests. For example gambling, computer games, social networks, and even television series that can go on and on, week after week, year after year, trapping their viewers into addiction.

We talk a lot about “personal responsibility” and how it’s up to each person to make good choices about how they spend their time. That is true as far as it goes, but it brushes over the incredibly strong forces of persuasion theory and how easily humans are manipulated. “Personal responsibility” doesn’t give us a hall pass to exploit the human brain’s weaknesses.

Nikhil Sonnad writes that Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason:

Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

Here’s the crux of it:

There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.

In Filter Failures Ethan Chiel asks if platforms are sucking the joy out of the internet, and he makes a pretty compelling argument:

The internet as we use it now is, for the most part, what the large platforms want it to be: an engine for serving us what their various systems think we want, or what we wanted before, or what our demographics want en masse.

Here’s the problem:

What’s lost in the process is whatever you might have found that neither you nor an algorithm might guess is interesting. Some song in a forum thread you idly clicked on, a news item about something you’ve never expressed interest in or heard of that you read because you had 5 minutes to kill and it caught your eye.

This reminds me of how we used to browse music stores. We idly flipped through CDs, and picked a few to try out in the listening booth based on the cover, the song titles, and some undefined ¯_(ツ)_/¯ factor. Now we just see and hear what we’ve seen and heard before, and the cycle continues…

Thi Nguyen’s essay Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult is one of the most insightful things I’ve read in a long time. Nguyen argues that echo chambers are very different from what he calls “epistemic bubbles”, and that conflating the two concepts places our focus on the wrong solutions to the problem. In short, the difference is this:

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.
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Epistemic bubbles are easy to pop, because all it takes is to introduce previously unheard voices into it. Echo chambers, however, are extremely difficult to penetrate, because at its core lies the belief that everyone not in it is untrustworthy:

An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.

Or to put it even more succinctly:

An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

This is a long essay, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing. It was a real eye-opener for me.

I should stop reading (and writing) about Facebook at some point, but there’s been some really interesting thinking around the social internet in general recently. I especially enjoyed Benedict Evans’s The death of the newsfeed, because it puts into words a lot of things I’ve been thinking about. On the social implications of algorithmic feeds:

One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ Sometimes this is the same thing - my friend and I both want me to see that they’re throwing a party tonight. But if every feed is a sample, then a user has no way to know who will see their post. Indeed, conceptually one might suggest that they have no way to know if anyone will see this post.

This is one of the major flaws of algorithmic feeds. People share things so that those things can be seen. But if you can’t tell who will see the things you share, that’s frustrating, and more than a little nerve-wracking. Hence the move back to smaller networks:

I think one could suggest that this is some of what’s behind the suggestions of systemically lower engagement on Facebook newsfeeds, and behind the obvious growth of person-to person chat (most obviously WhatsApp, iMessage, FB Messenger and Instagram - three of which Facebook of course owns). The social dynamics of a 1:1 chat work much more strongly against overload, and even if one person does overshare they’re in a separate box, that you can mute if you like. […]

Messaging can be more private, have less social pressure, and be more fun. A Snapchat story isn’t a permanent record and has less pressure to show off your perfection. Stickers and filters are more fun and spontaneous than Facebook’s rigid blue boxes (and the days of throwing sheep at people are gone alone with Facebooks’ platform). And some of these offer light-weight ways to interact without obligation, which was also a feature of Facebook’s model, but deliver that piece of Maslow in different ways.

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On that note, I think the distinction Cal Newport draws in On Social Media and Its Discontents is really important:

There’s a distinction between the social internet and social media.

The social internet describes the general ways in which the global communication network and open protocols known as “the internet” enable good things like connecting people, spreading information, and supporting expression and activism.

Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital.
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In the final analysis, I agree with Cal:

I support the social internet. I’m incredibly wary of social media.

I can’t get this quote from Dan Cohen’s Back to the Blog out of my head:

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

For anyone who doesn’t get why features like Instagram Stories are so popular, there you go. “Ambient humanity” is a very strong force. We share seemingly insignificant details about our lives not because we think everything we do is important or worth sharing. We do it to know we’re not alone.

(link via Kottke.org)

This story by Rene Chun about China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech is wild:

Don’t even think about jaywalking in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Last year, traffic-management authorities there started using facial recognition to crack down. When a camera mounted above one of 50 of the city’s busiest intersections detects a jaywalker, it snaps several photos and records a video of the violation. The photos appear on an overhead screen so the offender can see that he or she has been busted, then are cross-checked with the images in a regional police database. Within 20 minutes, snippets of the perp’s ID number and home address are displayed on the crosswalk screen. The offender can choose among three options: a 20-yuan fine (about $3), a half-hour course in traffic rules, or 20 minutes spent assisting police in controlling traffic. Police have also been known to post names and photos of jaywalkers on social media.

I can’t help but be reminded of that “biometric advertising” scene in Minority Report:

I think everyone has “Facebook Article Exhaustion” right now. But Brian Barrett’s Facebook Owes You More Than This makes a somber, important point:

This is not a screed about deleting your Facebook account. It’s not a rant about online ads. It is an argument, though, that Facebook has been a poor steward of your data, asking more and more of you without giving you more in return—and often not even bothering to ask. It has repeatedly failed to keep up its side of the deal, and expressed precious little interest in making good.

If you feel exasperated by the whole Facebook privacy debacle, I think this article will help make sense of some of those feelings. One more quote:

But as Facebook collects more and more data, and offers advertisers more and more tools to monetize it, the benefit to you seems not to have grown in kind. You get an ever-shifting algorithm designed to keep you scrolling, which the company’s own research suggests can leave you “feeling worse afterward.” You get dozens of Russian propagandists flooding millions of News Feeds with high-emotion content designed to undermine US democracy, with slow and incomplete disclosures about the impact. And you get ads for the same pair of shoes—that you already bought—trailing you for months.

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Also check out the always excellent Paul Ford’s Facebook Is Why We Need a Digital Protection Agency, in which he calls for a digital equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. His reasoning:

The activist and internet entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski once described big data as “a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.” Maybe we should think about Google and Facebook as the new polluters. Their imperative is to grow! They create jobs! They pay taxes, sort of! In the meantime, they’re dumping trillions of units of toxic brain poison into our public-thinking reservoir. Then they mop it up with Wikipedia or send out a message that reads, “We take your privacy seriously.”

Spotify has been in the news quite a bit recently, especially since their IPO announcement. The best article I’ve read so far about Spotify’s business model (and challenges) is Ben Thompson’s Lessons from Spotify:

Spotify’s margins are completely at the mercy of the record labels, and even after the [lower royalties] rate change, the company is not just unprofitable, its losses are growing, at least in absolute euro terms.

Ben goes further to explain how difficult it would be for Spotify to cut out record labels completely:

Notice how little power Spotify and Apple Music have; neither has a sufficient user base to attract suppliers (artists) based on pure economics, in part because they don’t have access to back catalogs. Unlike newspapers, music labels built an integration that transcends distribution.

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Profitability aside, it’s fascinating and kind of scary to get a sense of the oversized role that Spotify plays in deciding what becomes a hit song. Austin Powell digs into the details in his article Inside the booming black market for Spotify playlists:

The biggest of those playlists can essentially manufacture hits. A single add to Spotify’s influential RapCaviar, which boasts more than 8 million followers, can result in hundreds of thousands of streams, depending on where it’s placed and how long it stays there. RapCaviar has been credited, for example, with making Smokepurpp’s “Audi” go gold, with 68 million streams and counting.

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But wait, there’s more (as the say). Some of Spotify’s biggest playlists are owned by none other than the record labels themselves. From Liz Pelly’s The Secret Lives of Playlists:

On other playlists, you’ll occasionally notice different logos: the thick cursive word Filtr, the all-caps logo for Topsify, or simple rounded text reading Digster. These are the playlisting brands owned by the major labels: Filtr by Sony, Topsify by Warner, and Digster by Universal.

What does this mean?

Outside of the Spotify staff-curated playlists, those curated by Filtr, Digster and Topsify have more visibility on the Browse pages than any other playlisting brands, individuals or labels. With these playlists, employees of Filtr, Digster and Topsify can simply log in and add tracks.

“Things like Topsify, Digster and Filtr remain good resources, especially for [major label] developing artists,” says Jeff. “I know that I can plug in such-and-such track to five [of our] playlists and start to rack up some plays, some revenue for that artist, get it in front of some new listeners, and you also get some algorithmic stuff going. Like Release Radar and Discover Weekly.” By using Filtr, Topsify and Digster playlists to generate activity on their own material, the majors effectively use these playlists to pump their artists into Spotify-owned algorithmic playlists.

The musical world belongs to the “curators” and algorithms. We’re just listening in it. And the company that has the most control over it all is not even close to being profitable.

Two related articles about YouTube caught my eye over the past few days. The first, Zeynep Tufekci’s YouTube, the Great Radicalizer explains how YouTube’s algorithms almost always lead people to conspiracy theory videos:

It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century. […]

What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind the curtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.

This is bad enough, but then there’s James Cook’s article YouTube suggested conspiracy videos to children using its Kids app, in which he explains how not even the YouTube Kids app is immune to this:

YouTube’s app specifically for children is meant to filter out adult content and provide a “world of learning and fun,” but Business Insider found that YouTube Kids featured many conspiracy theory videos which make claims that the world is flat, that the moon landing was faked, and that the planet is ruled by reptile-human hybrids.

I try not to be too quick to call technology evil, but this is definitely not a “all technology is neutral” situation. Product managers and developers have the power to stop this kind of escalation from happening.