Today Mark Zuckerberg accounced his new vision for Facebook as a more privacy-focused company. The principal change he thinks should be to have interoperable end-to-end encryption for all of Facebook’s apps. Although this would be an interesting improvement to protect the communication, the links with law enforcement are worrying. Who is deciding what patterns identify “bad actors”, and how are they not influenced by governments? It also a way for Facebook to seem like they deem it appropriate to decide who are “bad actors”, which is equally worrying in my opinion.
We have a responsibility to work with law enforcement and to help prevent these wherever we can. We are working to improve our ability to identify and stop bad actors across our apps by detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can’t see the content of the messages, and we will continue to invest in this work.
Another piece from The Intercept reminds us that may be another form of coporate white-washing, and how they haven’t delivered on any other privacy improvement promises.
A recent article from Kudina and Verbeek1 explores a different strategy to deal with the ‘Collingride dilemma’, a double-bind problem which roughly states that the impacts of new technology cannot easily be anticipated until the technology is developed, but that it hard to change the technology then. While in earlier stages it is easy to change the technology, but then we don’t know yet what it’s impact will be. The authors focus on the ethical variant of this dilemma which states that our value frameworks to evalue the technologies also change because of the technology:
(…) when we develop technologies on the basis of specific value frameworks, we do not know their social implications yet, but once we know these implications, the technologies might have already changed the value frameworks to evaluate these implications (p. 293)
They claim that the technical mediation approach can help with this dilemma by studying at an earlier stage during the technological development how “normative frameworks develop in interaction with technologies”:
It makes visible that the values used to evaluate technologies are not independent from these technologies but rather are co-constituted by them. A better understanding of these dynamic human-value-technology entanglements can substantially contribute to a more responsible design and use of technologies.
Kudina, O., & Verbeek, P.-P. (2019). Ethics from Within: Google Glass, the Collingridge Dilemma, and the Mediated Value of Privacy. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(2), 291–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243918793711 ↩︎
Fantastic podcast from France Culture’s “Les chemins de la philosophie”. Professor Patrick Wotling discusses on the podcast the philosophy of Nietzche and how forgetting can be a condition for the well functioning of social life:
Nietzsche nous apprend que l’oubli est positif, s’éduque, peut se contrôler et surtout qu’il est la condition qui rend possible énormément de choses, comme la vie sociale : le second traité de la “Généalogie de la morale” est fondé sur cette affaire de la tendance à l’oubli qui est une régulation fondamentale du vivant et la manière dont cette tendance à l’oubli peut être régulée, éduquée, contrecarrée, canalisée, représente pour Nietzsche le fondement même de la possibilité d’une vie communautaire. L’oubli est vraiment un processus positif si on le comprend bien.
Listen to the full podcast here.
I quite enjoyed this series from Gizmodo where reported Kashmir Hill tries to not use any of the five big tech companies. It’s especially revealing and perhaps lesser known how important they are on infrastructure of the internet. For example, Amazon hosts a large amount of websites, making it almost impossible to avoid Amazon completely.
Hettie O’Brien writes in an article on The New Statesman on the fantasies of tech solutionism for Irish border:
The logic here is peak Silicon Valley: technology vacates policies of their political intent, offering practical solutions that we can converge on regardless of political differences.
Yet this politics-free vision of the Irish border amounts to magical thinking. It’s not because the necessary technologies don’t exist; many already do. It’s that the proposed solutions, whether visible or not, would effectively monitor everyone and everything that passed across the Irish border, making it one of the most closely observed and therefore political crossings in the world.
Today I learned that there are standards in the patterns of the bumpy parts on pavements ("tactile paving") that help visually impaired people move around. Apparently there are different patterns that have their own meaning, such as when there are steps ahead or near a platform. Check out this video by Tom Scott that focuses on the patterns used in British streets. The standard they use (“Guidance on the use of Tactile Paving Surfaces”) can be found here.
Bloomberg Newsweek made a nice three part video series on the Chinese city Shenzhen. In the series Ashlee Vance gives a balanced view of how this city has grown rapidly over the last 40 years, showing both postive and negative sides of this “futuristic metropolis”. The full three episodes are part of the “Hello World” series and you can watch them here.
Can our phone use shape how we eat our food? A funny article from The Guardian provides some examples of devices to “tailor the dining experience around our phone-centric lifestyles”.
Fareed Zakaria in an article from Foreign Policy on “The End of Economics”:
Let me be clear: Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world. Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world.But in the heady days of post-Cold War globalization, when the world seemed to be dominated by markets and trade and wealth creation, it became the dominant discipline, the key to understanding modern life. That economics has since slipped from that pedestal is simply a testament to the fact that the world is messy. The social sciences differ from the hard sciences because “the subjects of our study think,” said Herbert Simon, one of the few scholars who excelled in both. As we try to understand the world of the next three decades, we will desperately need economics but also political science, sociology, psychology, and perhaps even literature and philosophy. Students of each should retain some element of humility. As Immanuel Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
This is enlightening talk from 1976 with philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Bryan Magee on fundamental questions such as “What is philosophy?”, “Why does it matter?”, and “Why should anybody be interested in it today?”.