Airbnb lowered prices for tourists, supplemented the income of renters, and simply made travel to major cities more fun. But upon inspection, it shares some things in common with more-controversial companies—albeit with less grave implications. Facebook and Twitter design for attention, but incidentally encourage mendacious outrage and trolling. eBay and Amazon design for open marketplaces, but incidentally encourage the frenzied resale of bulk-ordered toys around Christmas. Airbnb was supposed to challenge hotels by letting tourists pay renters. But its platform is unwittingly producing a subsidy of tourists, paid for by nonparticipating urban dwellers, who bear the cost of higher rental prices.
Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein has a gripping feature in Wired called Inside Facebook’s Two Years of Hell. It’s long, but very much worth reading. It takes us through a journey that starts with Facebook’s years of denial:
It appears that Facebook did not, however, carefully think through the implications of becoming the dominant force in the news industry. Everyone in management cared about quality and accuracy, and they had set up rules, for example, to eliminate pornography and protect copyright. But Facebook hired few journalists and spent little time discussing the big questions that bedevil the media industry. What is fair? What is a fact? How do you signal the difference between news, analysis, satire, and opinion? Facebook has long seemed to think it has immunity from those debates because it is just a technology company—one that has built a “platform for all ideas.”
And it ends at the point they are at now: starting to realize that they can’t hide behind the “we’re just a platform” excuse any more.
I should start by stating the obvious: I like technology and phones, and I think it’s essential for kids to be exposed to it so that they can be prepared for the future ahead. That said, despite its click-bait title, Jean Twenge’s Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? really got to me. She studied how teens tend to spend their time, and how it affects their mental health, and came to some alarming conclusions:
More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
I know that sounds a bit like fear-mongering—and maybe it’s not as bad as Jean makes it sound. But it’s still worth reading the article and making up your own mind based on the data presented.
I’ve been knee deep in hard sci-fi stories like Red Mars and Babylon’s Ashes over the past few months, so I have a special affinity for stories about space colonization at the moment. David H. Grinspoon’s The logistics and ethics of colonizing the red planet is a really interesting take on the ethics of colonizing a new planet:
Today on Earth we are grappling with the fact that you cannot “conquer” a planet, even if — especially if — it is your home and your life support system. If we go to Mars with the idea that we can charge ahead and subdue a new world, our efforts are doomed. We should rather study how we might learn to help cultivate a Martian Biosphere that is balanced and self-sustaining, as is the Earth’s.
What Galen Erso does is not simply watch a system be built and then whistleblow; he actively shaped the design from its earliest stages considering its ultimate societal impacts. These early design decisions are proactive rather than reactive, which is part of the broader engineering ethics lesson of Rogue One.
The exploration of how Galen didn’t just walk away but took an active role in the destruction of the Death Star is interesting and highly relevant to what I consider an “ethical awakening” in our use of technology. It’s one thing to #DeleteUber — and those campaigns can certainly be effective, in that case to the tune of 500,000 accounts. It’s quite another to “infiltrate” your company and basically sabotage its technology because you believe it’s ethically dubious. The really complicated question is who gets to decide whether or not a company’s “ultimate societal impact” is good or bad. And, of course, who watches the watchers…
I accidentally went to a Best Buy the other day. To make a long story short, after an unplanned but long and pleasant chat with an Amazon rep I walked out with an Amazon Echo. Much has been written about Alexa and how good it is, and everything you’ve read about it is accurate. But I want to focus on a different aspect of Alexa: how it’s making my kids more self-sufficient.
See, the thing about kids is, they need you all the time. And that’s cool, because we’re their parents and we love them and we want to be there for them. But some tasks are incredibly boring and menial. I’ve outsourced some of those to Alexa to the great delight of our kids, who continue to find new things she never gets tired of doing.
Alexa, turn on some music that Mom and Dad are totally sick of
The biggest win for my kids so far has been the realization that they can listen to any music they want to. Right now it’s the Moana and Trolls soundtracks. Over and over and over and over and over and… But that’s ok, because my wife and I can be in another room, and they can listen to Get your hair up as much as they want without driving us insane.
Alexa, help us not fight over the iPad
We let our kids do iPad. Let’s just get that out of the way first. Anyway, it’s usually a choice between TV or iPad, and when they choose iPad it tends to result in a constant fight over whose turn it is. Not any more. Now they each get two turns of 10 minutes, and Alexa keeps score. They use Alexa to set the timer, and there hasn’t been any fighting (well, about this…) since.
Alexa, make us laugh
My daughters aren’t big fans of my jokes. It’s fine, I’m not bitter about it. Anyway, they discovered Alexa tells jokes too. I personally think my jokes are way better than hers, and here’s my proof:
Like I said, I’m not bitter about it.
Alexa, are we bad parents?
This is, of course, the big question when it comes to technology. Should we immerse our kids in it or should we shield them from it? We all find our own way when it comes to parenting, and even though we’re still working on what this technology balance looks like, my current feeling is that voice-activated UI doesn’t have many of the issues that are traditionally brought up as negatives about kids and technology.
First of all, Alexa is inherently social. It’s conversational, friendly, and it never gets tired. We laugh at her together. The Echo is not an “alone” device, and I think there’s something really powerful about that. But second, it’s also really useful. Our kids love asking it questions, and coming up with new ways to trick it into a misunderstanding.
Conversational UI certainly has a long way to go. But I will say that I am so far pleasantly surprised with the natural way in which it integrates with our family life. It’s not a substitute for human interaction and connection, and our kids get that. But as a useful playmate of an entirely “other” type of technology, it’s a winner.
Craig Mod’s How I Got My Attention Back is one of those essays that I think will become a classic. It strikes that rare and difficult balance of talking about technology dependence without falling into the “ALL TECHNOLOGY BAD!” trap we often see in similar pieces. There’s so much that resonated with me, but this part in particular stood out:
The more I thought about my attention the more I thought about the limits to human scale. How technologies inevitably amplify ourselves — the best and worst parts — in a way that is almost impossible for us to comprehend. How that scale is so easily co-opted to attenuate our attention with the worst possible diet of high-sugar, high-carb nothingness.
I also appreciated the point he makes that as much as we tend to blame ourselves for being too “weak-willed” to give up Facebook or Twitter, we have to remember that there are thousands of people on the other side of that product who are trying to figure out new and innovative ways for us not to give it up. He quotes from Bianca Bosker’s Addicted to Your iPhone? You’re Not Alone:
“You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.
I’ve had my own struggles with this over the past year as I dealt with a huge personal loss. In the end, my re-entry to a more sustainable online presence came from a very unlikely source: a book I would never have read if someone didn’t force me…
Our CEO sent us all a copy of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and asked us to read it. I expected to snigger my way through it but boy, was I wrong. It is a fantastic plea for taking back our attention at work, and it provides some really useful guidelines on how to do that. For my part, the idea of “work blocks” is one I’ve taken to heart, and it’s done wonders for my productivity. I also bit the bullet on RescueTime, and it really is as good and useful as everyone says it is.
For more on work blocks and other non-digital productivity methods, check out Chris Bowler’s excellent resource on Working with Pen & Paper.
So I guess my one recommendation is, read Deep Work. Even if (or maybe especially if?) you don’t usually like business books. You won’t be disappointed.
“Most people have what we would call a telephone voice, so they actually change away from their local family accent when they’re speaking on the telephone to somebody they don’t know,” said Alan Black, a Scottish computer scientist who is a professor at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
They also have a “machine voice”, he said. “People speak to machines differently than how they speak to people. They move into a different register. If you’re standing next to somebody in an airport or at a bus stop or something, you can typically tell when they’re talking to a machine rather than talking to a person.”
This part on the design of Siri is really interesting:
Black speculated that “one of the reasons they designed Siri to be fundamentally a polite, helpful agent who isn’t your friend but works for you, is to encourage people to be somewhat polite and explicit to her, rather than being very colloquial. Because speech recognition is always hard when you drop into colloquialisms.”
There are a couple of interesting articles about Frank Ocean’s new album and how it’s causing a lot of waves in the music industry. The short version is that Ocean found a clever way to get out of his agreement with his label Def Jam, and sign an exclusive deal with Apple Music instead. As Ben Sisario notes in Frank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’ Amplifies Discord in the Music Business, the labels aren’t happy:
“The unprecedented run of exclusives by digital music services has put a tremendous strain on the relationship between artists and their record companies,” said Larry Miller, an associate professor of music business at New York University’s Steinhardt School. “We are seeing that play out in public now.”
Today, with Iovine’s connections and industry guile, Apple Music is becoming a de facto record label of its own. In just over a year, Apple has struck deals with Drake, Future, Chance the Rapper, and Travis Scott. […]
In response, Universal Music Group, which owns Def Jam, is quickly mobilizing against Apple Music’s exclusive streaming-rights model, which naturally limits the audience for new music. Without this model, Apple Music would be back to a prolonged competition to differentiate itself from its streaming competitors. With it, there’s a new, unprecedented competition: conventional record labels, which ideally develop artists into stars, versus Apple Music, which pays stars well.
I’m going to be in the minority here, but I don’t like Apple getting into the record label business. The entire idea of “exclusive” music releases rubs me the wrong way. And I’m just going to say it — this is the kind of stuff that happens when we get rid of physical media.
Examples such as WhatsApp demonstrate that real-world innovation, in many ways, looks like an assembly line. At one end is a customer pain point or a potential new market. At the other is a product or service that solves the problem or addresses the market in a way nobody has thought of before. In between, people sit down and force themselves to examine the problem from a variety of fresh angles. Sometimes they tap the lab and bring a radical new technology to bear. But much more often they reach for pieces of technology that already exist and assemble them with new (or old) capabilities to produce a solution that turns the pain point into a delighted customer. Think of it as high concept meets whatever is lying around — an unconventional combination.
The problem comes when we reach for technologies that seem “cool” but can’t actually be linked to any real customer problem.
Yes, after a long break I’m giving the blog another shot. Let’s see how it goes…
