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Social media was supposed to liberate us, but for many people it has proved addictive, punishing and toxic. What keeps us hooked?
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"Now, having my mindset committed to learning to code, that’s exactly what is happening. I am learning to code. Programming has been officially taken down from the pedestal."
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“The future doesn’t just happen. We are building it, and we are building it all the time.”
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Meet Barry: his sole purpose in life is to listen patiently, and then protest or sob a little as you fire him from an imaginary job in virtual reality.
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President Donald Trump’s idea to buy Greenland may be fantasy, but the US has staked an interest in the island’s resources — in particular, its rare earth minerals. The US recently signed a memorandum to co-operate with the autonomous territory on rare earth mining in order to promote investment in
China dominates the global production of these rare earths, a group of 17 metals difficult to commercialise but critical to high-tech applications, including electric vehicles, wind turbines and military technology. More than 70 per cent are mined, and an even higher percentage processed, in China. ...Read More
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It’s distressing, if not surprising, that the Chinese government has allegedly been using social media to systematically dehumanize its own citizens in the same stark language that helped to fuel the Rwandan genocide. From the standpoint of social media, however, it’s emblematic of a wider problem in which platforms built
It also suggests that Facebook’s focus on “election interference” in the wake of 2016 has been too narrow. China’s campaign in Hong Kong makes it clear that public discourse can and will be gamed and distorted at any time, rendering irrelevant tactics like the “election war room” that Facebook has ...Read More
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"Even thou their names kind of give up the purpose of each attribute type, let’s configure a button element to illustrate how attributes contribute to the element denotation. Do not worry, you do not have to write anything during this example. Just keep reading 👀."
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"Schumacher's emphasis on what he called "intermediate technology" (neither basic nor large-scale) as the solution to many of the world's problems… "A crank", he said, "is a piece of simple technology that creates revolutions". Nice."
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This is not a case of a company with a reasonably sound operating business that has managed to inflate stock market expectations a bit. This is a case of a massive valuation that has no relationship to any economic fundamentals. But Uber's narratives convinced most people in the media, investment, ...Read More
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When Gordon Moore first projected the growth of “components per integrated function”, he put the doubling period at just about one year. This leads to expectations that this growth can be matched in other sectors of the economy… a category error based on a misunderstanding of fundamental biophysical realities. Modern
(For those who haven't read it, Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism pretty much depends on the idea that we can get exponential growth Moore's Law style across a bunch of sectors in order to achieve post-work, post-scarcity society before the planet implodes.) ...Read More
"People’s ability to connect is the glue that holds our culture together. By thinning out our interactions and splintering our media landscape, the Internet has taken away the common ground we need to understand one another. Each of us is becoming more confident about our own world just as it ...Read More
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Henry Farrell on Twitter
Edward SnowdenVerified account @Snowden • twitter.com ↗︎
"There is a common trope in the literature on globalization that suggests that greater economic exchange has fragmented and decentralized power relations. We, in contrast, argue that these economic interactions generate new structural conditions of power. Complex interdependence, like many other complex systems, may generate enduring power asymmetries."
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Hundreds of schoolchildren have been drafted in to make Amazon’s Alexa devices in China as part of a controversial and often illegal attempt to meet production targets. Many of the children have been required to work nights and overtime to produce the smart-speaker devices, in breach of Chinese labour laws.
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Good article on the hollow promises of the corporate smart city by Kevin Rogan.
"The smart city isn’t a technological utopia, or an environmental lifeboat. It’s a few PowerPoint slides in a conference room demonstrating that there’s money to be made. And it’s coming to you soon."