BOX112: WHERE WE’VE BEEN WE DIDN’T NEED ROADS

21.08.24

I suppose there’s no excuse for the delay in missives. Things got busy and intense and I had to stop for a bit. Back in March I was getting back to PhD work, a few weeks later I had to put that aside as work got too intense and I had to focus up. Then on Friday I was at an event and, following a nip out for a call, caught the end of Alex’s bit where she said something like ‘blog, just blog’ and I sort of internally sighed and said ‘ok’ to no one in particular.

I am constantly trying to find ways to squeeze the most out of the time in the day but tend to shirk ‘productivity hacks.’ I enjoy doing the work and spending time with things there’s just never enough time so I’ve found rhythm really important – regular beats of physical and mental exercise that refresh the flesh machine. I suppose everyone is different: A post from Jay was about the pressure to produce weekly and he talked about some interesting folks that publish when they feel like it without regard for the algorithm and then there of course is Matt’s advice is to publish when it feels right (which for him is multiple times a week, usually at night).

But I like and rely on rhythms, beats, deadliness and regulation to know what I’m doing moment-to-moment and I think I’d felt ‘I’ll get back to the blog when I have something to say.’ But instead, I just went around saying those things because sitting down to write is a more strenuous process. But that’s sort of the point; putting effort into forming up thoughts and properly reflecting has always been really important and has benefits over time so here we are again. All that said, don’t expect big hot reckons today. I’m just reactivating all these muscles and stretching and yawning. And absolutely do not expect renders right away. Instead, this post contains bits and pieces from the last few months.

LinkedIn is for Boats

A few years ago, amidst the furore over Cambridge Analytica, PRISM and the creeping idea that maybe this whole social media thing was really potentially not very good over all, a new outfit called Ello briefly popped up which the design/futures/art/tech community gleefully hopped on for a few weeks. The premise was simple – no ads, no tracking – but this was before that sort of thing raised suspicions that one day they would start to figure out a way to extract money from you through subscriptions or similar.

Anyway, Ello had a bunch of curious features in its beautiful simplicity such as only being able to integrate the bread and whale emojis instead of like thumbs and hearts which thus became stand-ins (🍞🍞🍞 = very good, for instance) but the whole thing was like busting down the door to a massive empty warehouse with your friends, looking around and wondering ‘…what is this for? What are we supposed to do with it?‘ A sager group of people might have considered that this heralded the end of social media, that without the cajoling and prodding to force interaction, we were kind of fine just hanging out and talking and maybe should have disbanded. But Ello had a very particular design feature; a full-width feed. Yes, instead of a narrow vertical scroll, it had a full-width scroll like an old forum and so… Ello was for boats. Or more accurately, pictures of boats because the aspect ratio of the scroll suited boats.

I was talking with friends the other night (mostly from academia) about how increasingly resigned they are to accepting that LinkedIn is now all that’s left and that’s sort of sad but I think the reason it remains is because LinkedIn is actually for something. Sure, that thing is humiliating self-promotion but at least it has a purpose while the rest of them are sort of just ‘places’ or ‘communities’ in a busy, noisy world.

The fediverse is too complex and fractured to really resuscitate the feeling of early Twitter and the Meta stable are all horrifically over-engineered advertising psyops so really all that’s left is the blue jobs website. When I left academia, well I don’t mind telling you, I was shook by the seriousness with which LinkedIn is taken having spent years understanding it as this strange little interactive CV that you might update once a year while getting in rolling arguments over on Twitter. But while all these others are scrabbling around trying to figure out what they’re for (Instagram is for ~~photos~~, ~~videos~~, ~~reels~~, ~~storie~~s, ~~rooms~~, ~~voice notes~~, ~~calls~~, spaces) LinkedIn is just for hustle. LinkedIn isn’t a network, it’s a service; sometimes literally serving you jobs, sometimes serving your ego. The vast majority of people aren’t going to LinkedIn for lifelong, deep, intellectually and spiritually enriching community engagement: You just take something you did, dress it up as some massive revelatory experience, tag a bunch of folks, lob it over the wall and move on with your life. Everyone’s doing the same so no one finds it particularly obnoxious anyway.

In the post-Muskian Twitter period, there was this frenetic squabbling over where this massive community would relocate, to various decentralised platforms that require a lot of active engagement and push to make work. Maybe that brief period of parasocial relationships with strangers on the Internet is over and that’s just fine. Maybe a super transactional, collective fiction where we treat the platform as a service rather than a community is healthier anyway.

Recents

Malina and I ran a second session on Speculative Design for Milan Politech’s service design executive masterclass. This time we took them through a whole futures and speculative design process from beginning to end, starting with working with trends, to scenarios, to worldbuilding to designing things from that world that they then performed back to the group in diegetic livestreams, court cases and adverts. It’ revealing how tight 7 or 8 hours is to get that stuff across to folks but they really gave it their all to get into it.
I did an interview for Design Decode over the last few weeks. A couple of friends have also been featured recently, Michela who puts it all together is an incredible and diligent researcher and a thoughtful interviewer. Having the questions weeks in advance and such well-crafted ones meant I probably massively over thought it but anyway, you can go there for similar thoughts to what you might get here but perhaps more concise.
A piece I wrote for Towards the Realm of Materiality on the interface from Minority Report has been published. The book invited various authors to explore the ficitonal technologies of Philip K. Dick. I wrote about how it serves as a sort of incarnation of computational imaginaries up to that point (2001) and has perversely incentivised the development of computational technology since. Twenty-three years later, we are still trying to build things from Minority Report. Julian also invited me back on the Near Future Laboratory podcast to talk about it briefly.

Reading

Our friend Paul Graham Raven has been turning his hand to content. Here’s the first bit of content on living with the mess of contradictory but equally true theories and resist the urge to eliminate one or the other. In the case of the titular theory; is doomscrolling causing a decline in mental health or is a decline in mental health causing more doomscrolling. Why not both?
I read this article on AI becoming a technology of faith. There’s nothing surprising in there but it articulates how grandiose promises are used to obfuscate current failures, in this case a promise of a smart health assistant based on technology that makes stuff up. The telling part though, which is not unusual is when the writer brings up Sam Altman on the risks posed by such intimate health data being potentially accessible to employers:

Huffington suggested that Thrive’s AI platform would be “available through every possible mode,” that “it could be through your workplace, like Microsoft Teams or Slack.” This led me to propose a hypothetical scenario in which a company collects this information and stores it inappropriately or uses it against employees. What safeguards might the company apply then? Altman’s rebuttal was philosophical. “Maybe society will decide there’s some version of AI privilege,” he said.

Which sort of summarises another aspect of this hubris; ‘It’s not my fault if my ideas cause harm, that’s society’s problem.’
Ok I didn’t capture any other reading. For your info I tend to ‘tweet’ things I read as I read them here (ew) and here (sigh) but also bookmark things here.

Listening

Aespa – Armageddon, The 1st Album

Ok, sorry it’s been so long. Sometimes feels like that’s all life is – stumbling along, tripping and apologising profusely even as no one actually cares that much. Sonder. Love you.

BOX098: We can viral it for you wholesale

12.07.23

DS084: Almost entirely re-using existing assets in a new arrangement, which is part of the reason for having those assets in the first place.

Mark Cavendish crashed out of Le Tour on stage eight. It was a minor little bump and shuffle in the peloton that saw him tumble and break a collarbone. If you didn’t know, this was going to be his last tour before retirement in which he hoped to eek ahead of the 34 stage wins he shares with Eddy Merckx to become the world record holder. Since he returned a few years back it’s always been edgy. Cavendish is one of the last few hotheads in the sport; unlike the current crop of media-trained, elusive professionals, there was always a lairy threatening-ness to him, like an overly-effusive new ‘friend’ in the club. You could never tell if he was suddenly going to flip and start an argument or fight.

Underneath it all is the fact that, even when you’re a ‘legend,’ by the time you’ve passed prime, you’re basically just kept around for your PR value for the team and your legendary status. Your whole career and role in the team is no longer structured around promise or potential, or even a solid, recognised position, but the popular memory. In the past, that’s visibly and audibly weighted heavy on him, where he’s seemed tense and stressed, desperate to prove he’s still valuable. This tour was different though; he was cheery, relaxed, playful. This was his last tour and he only needed one victory to have ticked off his life’s ambition and retire happy but with a little tumble that’s been taken away.

It’s doubly sad because Cav is only a little bit older than me. Elite-level cycling is obviously a different ball-game (pardon the mixed metaphors) than hot reckons and whatever it is I think I’m doing, but knowing someone his age is considered ‘veteran,’ ‘grandee,’ and ready for retirement does dig a little. Anyway, he may yet get another chance, it’s just a case of whether he wants it or not.

An algorithm for viral

So I did sign up for Threads because I am a person with a career and a morbid curiosity in the world. But last week I thought about the death of social networks as a hardware and energy problem: You’re storing huge amounts of media on these huge server stacks costing massive overhead on the off-chance that 0.00001% of it goes viral and propels a bunch of ads into a couple of million people’s eyes. The input/output formula just doesn’t work. The dream of converting eyeballs into $$$ has always been promissory; that one day someone would crack the perfect formula and balance the scales and so the investment had, until recently, kept flowing.

Now generative AI comes along with the promise that you don’t need to store petabytes of dog videos and reactions to train crossings; you can just generate content on-the-fly and microtarget it. And, undoubtedly, inevitably, any day now, some AI startup is going to claim to have cracked the formula for vitality. They will claim to have the algorithm that can read the zeitgeist, plug into the news, scan the trends, identify the audience, read the airwaves man, and perfectly position a perfectly generated viral clip, image or tweet.

And it actually doesn’t matter that that’s not true; that virality, like art, is elusive and gestalt; not reducible to measurable and modellable qualities because tech is promissory, it’s always what it’s going to do, not what it actually does. However, what the crack Ai viral algorithm will do, will be a megamagnet for VCs now disillusioned with a social network innovation cycle which is just stealing and micro-slicing interfaces form each other in an an attempt to recapture the honeymoon period of when users saw them as a benefit rather than a necessary bother.

(Or as Bruce Sterling once said; ‘all tech companies eventually just become airlines; they’re a pain but you don’t have a choice.’)

Threads, as so many have said, is a bit of a mess. The Facebook-y stuff is good; the interface and experience of being captured by a cultish belief in abstract notions of ‘community’ and ‘connectivity.’ But the content is brittle; just awash with uninteresting nonsense from brands, celebrities and influence. Again, as many have commented, the benefit they have is a captive audience of people already on Instagram; what they don’t have is a reason to use it. Like the Labour party, simply being ‘not Twitter’ (not Tory) may not be enough to get it over the line.

So let’s think about it the right way round; Instagram and TikTok, the current big ~~social networks~~ media catapults are products of an advertising and content algo-logic that emphasises scale, multiplied by attention, to the non-zero factor of virality. AI is all about scale and the use of that to pinpoint that non-zero chance of virality. In that context, is the most profitable next model another waterfall of gibberish a la Twitter? Probably not, why have the noise when you can map the perfect path for a user to get to the ad you want. (Or at least you say you can and you built a platform around that promissory idea to sell to investors.)

A metaphor riffing on Bruce: In another conversation I compared social networks to Zeppelins; a small, tragi-comedy blip in the history of flight which over a hundred years settled around the mid-horror of budget airlines. Now it’s getting all hyped about hydrogen fuel to save or right-way a flawed and destructive model and tech bro evangelists tell us we’ll all be in personally autonomous flying taxis by 2045. Meanwhile, lots of us wonder why we don’t just have better trains.

I guess Threads is the speculation on hydrogen fuel, generative AI the autonomous flying vehicles. None of it works, but somethings are more palatable than others.

Short Stuff

Dave Karpf again that Threads’ problem will be in mistaking Twitter for a public arena when it was really for journalists, academics and other liberal elites. It’s a good theory. Twitter always had a huge divergence in number of sign ups v active users with 10% of user doing 90-odd% of posting. There’s no new incentive for people to use the same form of interaction (save, perhaps the influencers and brands who are better served at Zuck’s house.)
Gary Marcus launched the Center for the Advancement of Trustworthy AI which is too long a title and too forgettable. THe idea of ‘AI governance in-a-box’ is smart though and draws on philanthropy to my point above.
Interesting paper delineating myth from metaphor in Causal Layered Analysis (if that’s your kind jam).

I think I’m drifting away from Are.na. I need somewhere to store reckons, signals, images and tools and Are.na is just too much of a moodboard to give me the cross-functionality I need. I’ve been using raindrop.io to save and sort things but as far as I know there’s no public face for it so there’s no way of sharing what I’m saving/reading.

Anyway, love you, bye.

Box097: Let it go

05.07.23

DS083: This one was even a bit quicker, took about 20 minutes. A lot of addons in Blender have lapsed which has slowed things down. I used to use Extreme PBR and Botaniq to make materials and eg trees easier but they’re all disconnected or out of date.

When I left academia I discovered quite quickly that (against the understanding of the entire universe to that point) actually no-one was really using Twitter dot com. No one I work with uses it, no one I meet is eagerly following or sharing tweets, no one looks at it. Everyone is a reluctant LinkedIn user. LinkedIn has a perverse evergreen-ness due to it being 95% utility: It doesn’t pretend to be a ‘marketplace of ideas’ or really even an actual community. Like a lot of the posts on it, it’s a cynical smokescreen for grandiose self-promotion and uninformed reckons pinned up on a monolithic noticeboard of job ads, job requests, prognostications about the future-of-whatever and the occasional glimpse of candidness and truth. I’m totally happy to suspend my pride and jump on that bandwagon when it suits because we all know we’re in the same game.

So LinkedIn will probably last as long as there is in fact jobs and pride because that’s what it’s for. For the others however, I’m sure you know it’s a bleak time: Facebook was for something that the people who got on it early (like me) have now grown out of; eg. engaging in voyeuristic social status battles. We deployed weaponised pictures of food, children, holidays and parties with abandon until it didn’t matter anymore and a sickeningly-sweet cream of ‘influencers’ rose to the top and colonised Instagram where they defined the psychosocial aspirations of the insecure generation left gasping for breath in the wasteland former battlefield of the early social networks.

Twitter was for tech people to talk about their mundane experience, became an academic and thought leader hot-takes roller derby that lowered the intellectual calibre of the world and is now twenty different things (most of them ugly) and is being busily killed off by a ‘genius.’ I’ve had some horrible experiences on Twitter, the niches and cliques and confirmation bias enabled and encouraged by an engine that drives conflict are the easily ignorable side of that horror. The abuse and violence others (particularly women) suffer is the worst of it. (Not to excuse LinkedIn from that either; anywhere men are strutting and butting heads will result in abuse directed at women.) Reddit I liked, I liked browsing it for random nonsense, but that too seems to have faced up IRL problems with how the hell you pay for this infinite scroll of stuff by, just like Twitter, restricting it.

So now everyone is looking around for the next place to get their hit. My chats last few weeks are filled with people sharing invites and tips on using the plethora of alternatives. For a while it was Mastadon but it was too complex to understand. Then there’s the Discords and Slacks but they’re invite only and tend to be about evangelising something. There’s a new one, Bluesky which comes from @jack who is far form innocent; Instagram is launching a Twitter-like feature (who the hell is the designer over there just sticking stuff on without regard like a Katamari?).

As Dave Karpf points out, this scrabble to claim a dwindling space everyone hates is all probably less about the ‘end of social’ than the end of the infinite scroll that has characterised the speculative business model of social networks (capture audience attention, provide infinite distraction with scrolling, pepper with ads: If there’s infinite content the chances of clicking on an ad is non-zero.) This makes sense: Content is expensive, energy is getting more expensive and all of a sudden generative AI crops up with the potential that instead of having to store and serve this infinite wheel of content from your warehouse in Utah to a phone in Peckham, you can just have an algorithm generate infinite content on the fly. Folks like Rob Horning and Charlie Warzel have written on this as a world where nothing truly ends.

The thing about all these new socials is they’re all clones of or variations on a theme; there’s nothing really new that I can tell. They’re limited in design terms by the muscle memory of the users eager for the next fix in the style of 2015-era Twitter and it’s easy to sate that by promising that nostalgic experience. They’re all working in the same constraints and so end up with the same problems. Or, as with Mastadon, over-complicate it for non-super-users.

So what if we just let the door quietly close on this chapter of online life. Social failed and irreparably damaged the social fabric of the world. The promised metaverse never arrived and was a colossal failure, Web3 is all scams. Just let it go: Resist the urge to find the next thing, to tip-off the next social network. It’s over; the anger is too real; the scars too fresh. We’ve been so gaslit into believing we need it, so addicted to the infinite scroll that we’re running gratefully into the arms of the next abuser. Just don’t.

I’ll be happy to see the notifications gradually decrease in urgency and to see my screen time come down. I have a phone battery that now lasts 24 hours. Of course, LinkedIn will remain because it’s more a service than a network, BeReal is still great and weird and we should have stopped and stuck with Ello when it was ships.

Upcoming

On 20th July at 1600 CET I’m doing a talk for Foresight Europe Network. I’ll be talking about design at Arup Foresight. Free to all and you can sign up here.

Short Stuff

I’ve watched half the amazing Disco Elysium investigation from People Make Games now. The first half is very dense in financial and legal information which I thought I could absorb on background. I’ll be honest, he’s not a great interviewer; quite hesitant and doesn’t push the point with the various protagonists of the drama. But it’s exceptionally thorough.
AI is a lot of Work on the Verge. It’s not news to anyone but this is a pretty comprehensive breakdown of the what an why of invisible labour in AI.
I’ve been on a run of AI Art methodology pieces lately, which isn’t particularly productive when I thought I’d finished with my methodology. But here’s a good one from Crawford and Stark which examines a lot of the mid-2010’s surveillance/data art and the ethics of it.
I read a lot about AI as you know and you can often find good criticism or good speculation but it’s rare to find them co-articulated very well together. This brilliant paper on ‘permacomputing’ (eg. computing within ecological limits) is a really good match. It offers a great analysis and critique of ‘techno-maximalism’ and the accompanying fantasies and visions of techno-futures but then pivots to proposing life in the alternative. It’s rare to see those together: “…when we talk about permacomputing aesthetics, it is not just about technical implementation, or about countering a broken maximalism with an exact opposite, such as an equally broken minimalism. It is about reimagining, dreaming, and experimenting with alternative ways of engaging with computer and network technology.”
Daniel shared this podcast episode on the psychoanalysis of AI doomerism from Rendering Unconscious. I’m listening to it now. It’s good to hear the connection of ‘the promises of SIlicon Valley have failed’ with ‘we need a new wonder product’ with ‘we need a new narrative for this time we cry wolf’ with ‘how about “you have to deal with it or we’ll all die?”‘ with ‘yeah sure, also mysogyny.’ All put much better than I’ve been managing to.
Go subscribe to Beth Singler‘s newsletter.
Good summary from Dave Karpf on the inelegant ongoing Demise of Twitter.

I worry that my defensive knack for self-depreciation and unseriousness is damaging my career a little. I sometimes have the impression that I should take my work with a total seriousness. But I have always believed that work should be fun and also what I do is a bit silly. Mrs Revell does serious work. Everyday she directly and measurably improves the lives of the people she interacts with, to the point of saving them and she’s paid fuck all and is constantly getting abuse for it. So I will continue to take the serious bits serious (catastrophic collapse of the systems that support life on Earth) and the fun bits fun (reckoning and speculating).