Well this is the first time in a while that I’ve managed to meet my weekly obligation twice in a row! Something about this new format must be working. There’s less on the insights front here than on the ‘interesting stuff’ front. Things are good at Revell™️. I can’t say fully settled but the paths are clearing, we can see the cobblestones underneath, things pull into focus, rhythms are settling.

Five Things

1. Wikipedia is getting full

There’s one editor for every 166 articles on Wikipedia compared to Encyclopaedia Brittanica that claims one for every 29. This means it’s getting increasingly difficult to add new articles as editors are overwhelmed. This has been ossified in the submission process which is increasingly stringent and the overwhelming majority of things are rejected. Over the last two decades, Wikipedia has gone from a site of cynicism and suspicion over the quality and veracity of its content to probably the last generally trusted and moderated place on the Internet. There’s implications for misinformation here but also model training. If you can’t pull moderated and somewhat verified facts from Wikipedia for your training data, where are you going to get them? Reddit?

2. GOAT blogging

Matt Webb has a short reflection on blogging on his blog. He’s been doing it for 25 years. I’ve been going for about 15 I think and his perseverance has been an inspiration to me – or an anxiety trigger as during his covid spurt. He’s written a short case for blogs. The pandemic saw the surge of newsletters which have now been locked into the SEO and marketing structures of SEO through Substack. The priority is about reaching an audience and selling your thoughts. I sign up to a lot of newsletters but even then, there’s still something uninvited about them, a pressure to keep up, being screamed at by town criers and assailed by spam through the letterbox while blogging remains (to me) an open invitation for a coffee and a chat.

Obviously blogging isn’t how I make my money, however I can appreciate the imperative for people to need to turn a buck from their reckons but it’s not the same as this slightly asynchronous chinwag that you’re welcome to come to or ignore as you see fit. The other thing about blogs (pre/non-Medium) is that vestige of personal authenticity – they don’t have to fit into the aesthetic or tactical structure of a newsletter. You could post a picture and some esoteric words (ah tumblr) or a 10,000 word screed and make it in bright pink on a white background. I wouldn’t, but you could.

I hope Matt blogs for another 25 years, I think now is the best time to start a blog, carve yourself out a little slice of the Internet to put your thoughts and send them like a sky lantern into the ether, wherever they may go.

3. Into the grain, into the distortion

Nick Foster here about finding the ‘grain’ of a technology to see what it means. I find that a really useful metaphor, where I’ve often struggled to talk about technology in terms of what it lends itself to or what affordances it brings. Most technology is accidental (distortion, synthesisers as he covers) as its effect on culture. So he talk a but how we can better understand the grain of new technologies to imagine how they might go into culture.

4. It’s always all about workplace surveillance

The story of workplace surveillance is one that can instantly drive one into paranoia. How would I know if/how much I’m being surveilled. I remember once telling me that IT can read my Teams messages to which I responded ‘sure, but why would they?’ I guess that’s how the panopticon works, it’s the the potential of it being read that polices behaviour. I also once had a conversation with someone (who would actually know) who told me the capabilities of surveillance the organisation did have but chose not to use, but that it was all just a push of a button away. 404 has this story about a computer vision system that can track the individual performance of workers in manufacturing. It’s 100 years since the time and motion studies and it’s basically just the same thing. A colleague asked me recently about AI being a paradigm shift and I was perhaps over-facetious in debating the point that a paradigm shift is a whole reordering of the socio-technical regime. The fact that the height of innovation is improvements on a 100-year-old idea tells you something about how much none of this is a paradigm shift, just a reanticualrion of the stuff we already have and hate.

Anyway, in classic Y Combinator fashion, they have no sense of the moral and ethical implications of these ‘innovations’ until they put them on social media and measure the backlash. Y Combinator literally has no ‘inside voice.’

5. China is aiming to end ‘severe’ air pollution by 2025

There’s always amazing stats about China’s green credentials. Air pollution kills 2 million people a year annually in the country. Half of those from ambient pollution but another one million from domestic cooking and technologies in the home. I supposed this exposes the enormous disparity in infrastructures between cities and rural villages and the speed and scale of infrastructure roll out. The focus seems to be on upgrading machinery at ports and so on to conform with new emission standards but a part of it is also moving from a focus on road for goods movement to beefing up rail and water infrastructure for good movement. A part of me wonders if my speculation on sailing ships quietly cruising across the seas laden with consumer tech might actually come to fruition.

Short

• At least oligarchs employ people and create value. Introducing the appistocracy.
• The Humane AI Pin is dead. It lasted ten months.
• Syria’s first international tech conference in 50 years.
• In Taiwan, students are increasingly plugging the labour gap in semiconductor plants at the cost of their education.
• Want a jacket made out of wood?
• Indians own 25,000 tons of gold as financial security.
• Solar power prescriptions.
• Because of currency, Nigerians are DIY’ing their own data centres/ers
• For every new job in the screen industries in Latin America, 66 ancillary jobs are created.

Recents

We’ve been working on a new publication at work; AI for Future Cities, which just launched. The aim is to see a little past the current hype into how AI might play out in different dimensions of cities over the next ten years. The first issue is on design and planning followed by energy, water, nature, circularity and workplaces. If they’re successful, we’ll run another volume next year.

For us, it’s also a move away from massive, hundred page PDFs of deep research that are hard to digest and difficult to do much with to producing things that are shorter, snappier and more conversation-starters. Let me know what you think.

Listening

This has been on repeat.

Ok, you know, I know, I love you and that’s all that counts. Speak next week.