Replying to @alextcone and @taubeneck
Oh wow!
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July 2022
134 tweets
Replying to @humanpropensity and @larakiara, @pbannist
On the principle I don't disagree, but this could also be a differentiating factor. Not all ML has to be opaque! Either way, I just meant this as an example of how to get there, I definitely won't say it's easy but I don't think it's insanely complex either!
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Turning search into a protocol?
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Replying to @null and @scriban2
I REGRET NOTHING
Replying to @null and @privacylawGER
Ha good one.
It's hard to think of a more promising start to a novel!
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Replying to @mariafarrell and @PikettyLeMonde
It's The Immortal King Rao by @vauhinivara .I'll report when I've read it!
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Replying to @coolharsh55 and @PikettyLeMonde
Hahaha, no it's this one.
Replying to @mariafarrell and @PikettyLeMonde
It's The Immortal King Rao by @vauhinivara .I'll report when I've read it!♥ 1
Everything you need to know about both the state of the US and the state of Google Search in one single screenshot.
Quoting a tweet by @rustypolished ↗
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To think that there I was, naively thinking that a bunch of overt fascists seeking to control every uterus and the fight for trans rights as human rights were, like, different things maybe?
I'm glad @nytopinion woke me from that slumber! This has Contributed To The Debate.
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Replying to @ruchowdh and @nytopinion
Ah, but both sides are actually the same! This is such original thinking.
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Replying to @Faust_III
Thank you!
Replying to @null and @NewsCEO
Thanks a lot!
Replying to @WolfieChristl
That's a very good point and I completely agree! There's a lot more to be written on this topic, notably on collective issues. I touch a bit on some collective aspects in berjon.com/stewardship/ but not specifically on the loss of self-discovery for communities.
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Replying to @Bored_Trevor and @LMSacasas
Sure — I don't think I meant to imply that absolutely *everything* was in that situation, only that it's a dominant part of the Internet experience. And I don't think it's intrinsic to the technology, we can fix this.
Replying to @Chronotope
It's been around for a while! I have often mused about things to do with it.
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Replying to @braedon and @Chronotope
Yeah, it's big and not entirely cheap to process. But I've been interested in running health-of-the-Web experiments on it.
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Beautifully written and brilliantly moving from @mariafarrell. There are many ways in which this speaks to depression, too.
crookedtimber.org/2022/07/05/set…
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Replying to @IEthics
Thank you 😁
Replying to @montezumachavez and @tim_libert
Deleted!
Bluetooth headphones were a mistake.
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Replying to @null and @happyborg
They always fail!
Replying to @null and @benharnett
I know right! Bluetooth headphones have now replaced printers as the dominant form of family tech support.
Replying to @frankrebecca
That is an EXCELLENT question!
Replying to @eve_gaumond
I don't know, I still like wires better. They Just Work™
I know I've been harping on building bridges between legal regulation and architectural regulation (from technology and tech standards) for a while, but look! A W3C CG draft document referenced in real-world regulatory rulemaking!
We can make this work.
Quoting a tweet by @montezumachavez ↗
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Japan, a country of 125 million inhabitants, had only one firearm-related death in all of 2021.
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🎶 You say Elon, and I say goodbye! 🎶
nyti.ms/3uB0HVw
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Replying to @null and @benharnett, @peterhgillies
More generally, the level of Dad Tech Support compared to wired ones is bad. Kids forget to charge them, they don't know how to pair, etc.
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Offloading privacy labour to people is a form of victim blaming. One thing I've been wondering about for a while is the degree to which today's dominant approaches to digital design encourage learned helplessness.
Quoting a tweet by @EvanSelinger ↗
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The Chilean constitutional process is fascinating and the proposed Constitution seems amazing. I hope it gets translated into English soon, and that they vote for it.
Quoting a tweet by @saaaauuull ↗
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This is all the more remarkable when contrasted with the US that is collapsing under the weight of cultish worship of its antiquated Constitution.
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Replying to @noUpside and @jonathanstray, @IEthics, @PhilBeaudoin
I've just been looking at amplification as the flip side of gatekeeping: it's deciding that a given audience gets to see given information. There's the organic kind (people repeat it around them) and the editorial kind (via recommandation algorithm or direct human decision).
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Any specific amplification can result in cascades (eg. with an epidiological model), but the two are distinct. Looked at this way the issues are about the concentration of gatekeeping power (a tiny number of companies makes these decisions at huge scales) and...
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...there are feedback loops between those companies' editorial amplification and their design of affordances for organic amplification.
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I would add: the issue is emphatically not about terrible content (though that is a part of it). Rather it is about how we collectively decide what information rises to prominence. Editorial monoculture is more worrying than bad content.
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Essentially, since we are epistemically social (but convinced of the contrary), the effects from gatekeeping concentration (editorially) and industrialisation (organically) are likely negative for our collective problem-solving abilities.
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Any reading recommendations about the characteristics that distinguish extractive from retentive infrastructure?
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Replying to @ACBrewst
But isn't this psychology? I'm looking for, like, roads and stuff kind of infrastructure. I mean not just roads, but that kind.
Replying to @kate_sills
Are you thinking of something different from perceptual hashing? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptua…
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Replying to @_prestwich and @kate_sills
Yes, they have all kinds of problems. "What people perceive" isn't a solved question, even assuming that everyone perceives in the same way, which we don't.
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Replying to @ddayen
Palm Beach County, though.
Replying to @kate_sills and @_prestwich
I'm no expert either, I've just used perceptual hashing to find existing files in non-adversarial situations. I share your intuition that finding very similar pics is almost certainly a lot easier than detecting CSAM.
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What I don't know is how trivial it is for a motivated attacker (who's making money) to defeat similarity detection. I would *think* that if nothing else, hashing various blur/resamples could help triangulate proximity in adversarial cases but I could be dead wrong.
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"The broadest understanding of domestication as control over reproduction might be applied not only to fire, plants, and animals but also to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal family."
James C. Scott doesn't fuck around.
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Café nuisette.
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Replying to @innovimax
Un jeu de mots gourmand!
Replying to @ussballantyne
?
Replying to @montezumachavez and @keir_lamont
It's a shame to see ADPPA so diluted that this would be a concern. The original draft, despite its warts, showed a much stronger understanding of privacy and of what digital markets need.
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Replying to @keir_lamont and @montezumachavez
Generally, it defaulted rather strongly to keeping data with the first party. That's better for contextual integrity and much better for publishers' businesses. You can't share data with third parties and keep publishers sustainable, it's a policy choice.
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Replying to @ntnsndr
Maybe give the DuckDuckGo app a shot, it has app tracker blocking built-in (at least on Android).
Replying to @ntnsndr
Yeah, you don't have to switch browsers to use the DDG app blocker. I browse on Firefox too, but block app trackers with DDG. It's far from perfect overall, but it's a clear improvement.
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Replying to @ntnsndr
I've been meaning to try /e/, have you given it a shot?
Yeah, tell me about it...
Arrivés avec des renforts pour nos camarades français en pénurie! ♥ 💪🏻
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Replying to @Cennydd
Worst offender is Keynote there. It's just bad.
Replying to @justefrancois
Non, c'est de la vraie.
The same is true of texts from those decades about digital technology enabling bureaucratic domination over people.
The problem is not foresight, it's designing capture-resistant forms of global governance.
Quoting a tweet by @alicebell ↗
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In this era of democratic backsliding, there is little that's more worrying than Google's irresponsible data handling practices.
Quoting a tweet by @MindingPrivacy ↗
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To put it more clearly, both my French grandparents spent the entirety of WWII fighting Nazis. Had Google been a German company in the 1930s, they'd be dead.
It's worth honest consideration: do we trust the state of American democracy enough to be comfortable with it today?
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Jeni is right: if you're legislating on privacy and aren't addressing collective issues, you're decades behind the problem.
Quoting a tweet by @JeniT ↗
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One interesting aspect of @netflix's foray into advertising is that it's bringing battles over privacy to TV.
Right now, TV systems are pretty leaky, with connected TVs and the likes of Roku observing and reselling behaviour. That's incompatible with Netflix's interests.
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You can only have a large scale sustainable ad business as a first party if intermediaries aren't able to extract and remonetise your data. Today's Web is captured by intermediaries for precisely the reason that it's a poor privacy environment.
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Those mistakes are being fixed on the Web, which is why you're seeing rearguard anti-privacy activism from intermediaries.
I look forward to seeing Netflix enter the arena.
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Replying to @gizmomathboy
I know, and it's not like Samsung TVs are any better.
Replying to @technopolitics and @daniellecitron, @netflix
Maybe, but those laws are hardly being enforced so they don't matter much here. Also, consent only improves privacy under specific conditions that I don't think are likely in this case.
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I was just reading @OlufemiOTaiwo about how the convergence of interests between elite and oppressed can be used to speed up justice. Alignment of business and people interests is a powerful special case of that!
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Replying to @technopolitics and @daniellecitron, @netflix
I know, but it's not like GDPR enforcement is stellar!
Replying to @technopolitics and @daniellecitron, @netflix
I'm a French guy who set up GDPR at NYT - I know 😉
But most companies still approach privacy as a compliance rather than a product concern, with risk management lawyers rather than strategists. The result is at best milquetoast and most often against their own interests.
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In this case my guess is that Netflix isn't going to be that blind and inept. They need to block Roku, Samsung, etc. from leeching data (rather than just getting some consent for them) and they'll fight for it.
At least, that's my bet & what I would do!
Replying to @omertene and @PrivacyPros
I'm curious: is there empirical evidence indicating that CPOs make a difference?
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Replying to @miles_fisher_ and @netflix
No, they should provide infrastructure as service providers.
This cliché annoys me no end. It may have been The Expanse's worst idea, even if they made it tolerable by having most screens be cracked. t.co/Wn3A1GAaIE
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Replying to @johnallsopp and @Coleran
I suspect that it's a combination of phones look boring but are hard to improve upon and it makes what's happening on screen a lot easier to film.
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Replying to @johnallsopp and @Coleran, @Bouletcorp
Some interesting considerations below.
"Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?"
Quoting a tweet by @Coleran ↗
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Replying to @miles_fisher_ and @netflix
The UX of TV systems is appalling.
If they want to have advertising as a business model, they can provide ad infrastructure to first parties with contextual integrity. Or ads in their own experience areas.
Replying to @Coleran and @LMSacasas
That's a very good point! The only exception might be the Metaverse, and it's from the behemoth that most needs to capture infrastructure, which unlike the others it failed to do.
Replying to @Coleran and @johnallsopp
Yes indeed! So much of today's "future" thinking from technologists seems to be about making Star Trek happen - which is to say a vision of tech in which technology miraculously does not create social power differentials (but no one ever tells you how that happens).
Replying to @macedits and @Coleran, @johnallsopp
There's good work on making parts of Internet/Web infrastructure into commons! It's not the subject of cool futuristic videos, though.
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Replying to @kate_sills
I wonder if the differences you point at with Plural Democracy are really ideological or have more to do with implementation strategies, some of theirs being naive or at least simplistic? It's hard to fully separate values from strategies, but there's room for it.
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Voting is to governance what consent is to privacy: there are cases in which it's the absolute best option, but it's also the heavy-handed solution that too many people naively reach for and when overused it will backfire.
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The alt models you list seem to me like they *do* have governance, it's just governance that's (very appropriately) limited to just what is needed to make things work. I'm not sure that goes against Plural Dem values?
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A lot of commons models described eg. by Ostrom or in GKC have little or no voting, sometimes despite the fact that they manage significant infrastructure!
The label "democracy" might be an issue due to association with voting. I might call my branch "Cambrian Governance" 😁
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Replying to @tobie and @kate_sills
In fairness, those folks are looking into these issues with stuff like quadratic voting. But yeah.
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Replying to @kate_sills
I have the persistent impression that what you are looking for is essentially "governance done right" but I might just be ideologically biased!
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Oh, I forgot to add: I don't know if you're familiar with the Aurora Apolito paper, but I think that it might be possible to infer answers to those questions that aren't in favour of voting from her use of IIT to describe the best social organisation.
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Replying to @Coleran and @macedits, @johnallsopp
In fairness, I don't think that things just got bad. I think that we're in genuinely novel territory for which we need innovative governance. That said, it's certainly the case that the big tech bureaucrats who have this power aren't working in ways that help at all.
I backed @benharnett's upcoming novel "The Happy Valley" and you could too!
kickstarter.com/projects/benja…
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Replying to @null and @benharnett
I look forward to reading it!
The @UnlockProtocol Litepaper has a very clear description of what it can do but also of the underlying philosophy. docs.unlock-protocol.com/litepaper/
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Replying to @mnot and @marcosc, @gsnedders, @annevk
Forever.
Replying to @kate_sills
She's looking for "a form of “collectivity” that everywhere locally max
imizes individual agency, while making collective emergent structures possible and
interesting." c4ss.org/content/52970
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I don't agree with everything but I think that the idea of using IIT is very interesting. I suspect (but am still mulling it) that collectivity with local agency under those constraints rules out excessive use of voting.
Replying to @tobie and @kate_sills
I generally agree, but a few things to note:
* From an incrementalist view, it's better than what we have today.
* Not all token voting has to be plutocratic (though it's often a problem indeed).
* There are ways of using votes in limited fashion. Eg. for...
...contribution goods, where you contribute to be in but then most decisions are by consensus with voting mostly used for metagovernance (à la W3C).
Replying to @tobie and @kate_sills
I think that the form of DAOs that we've seen so far has mostly been rather naive and limited. I wouldn't assume that they're the endgame.
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Replying to @tobie and @Chronotope, @kate_sills
I'm on the Internet every other day so I can't debate much but I think that equating all web3 work with (highly visible) dumbass cryptobros is a mistake. There's good work to be done, which is why looking at ideology matters.
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Replying to @Chronotope and @tobie, @kate_sills
I don't know, Aram, the past twenty five years haven't led me to believe that arguing over labels achieves much or prevents whitewashing. I'd rather just fix stuff so that bros don't matter.
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Replying to @tobie and @Chronotope
Even infra stuff like Unlock, FileCoin, or the Graph?
More to say soon, I reckon m
Replying to @tobie and @Chronotope
No amount of decentralisation tech can address the user agent problem, that's why we need papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
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Replying to @tobie and @Chronotope
most_interesting_man.gif: I don't whine often, but when I do, I do it on SSRN.
Replying to @tobie and @Chronotope
That paper is in bad need of serious editing. I've been letting it languish for a while, I hope to give it a full rewrite before the end of the year.
"Multiple brokers are likely hawking the same information, as half the world does not live in the United States, and half the world is not pregnant."
It's hard to tell if data brokerage is worse when the data is right or when it's wrong.
Quoting a tweet by @swodinsky ↗
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"Constitutions can thus be understood as an interface for a community’s shared values."
constitutions.metagov.org/article
I know a few of you knew her, so I'm saddened to share the passing of my mother, Trina Bouvet, a few days ago.
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